I had been the son of a laborer instead of
the son of a country landagent, I should have struck more grit
than I did. Unfortunately I'm not going back to visit the Irish
nation, but to visit my father and Aunt Judy and Nora Reilly and
Father Dempsey and the rest of them.

BROADBENT. Well, why not? They'll be delighted to see you, now
that England has made a man of you.

DOYLE [struck by this]. Ah! you hit the mark there, Tom, with
true British inspiration.

BROADBENT. Common sense, you mean.

DOYLE [quickly]. No I don't: you've no more common sense than a
gander. No Englishman has any common sense, or ever had, or ever
will have. You're going on a sentimental expedition for perfectly
ridiculous reasons, with your head full of political nonsense
that would not take in any ordinarily intelligent donkey; but you
can hit me in the eye with the simple truth about myself and my
father.

BROADBENT [amazed]. I never mentioned your father.

DOYLE [not heeding the interruption]. There he is in Rosscullen,
a landagent who's always been in a small way because he's a
Catholic, and the landlords are mostly Protestants. What with
land courts reducing rents and Land Acts turning big estates into
little holdings, he'd be a beggar this day if he hadn't bought
his own little farm under the Land Purchase Act. I doubt if he's
been further from home than Athenmullet for the last twenty
years. And here am I, made a man of, as you say, by England.

BROADBENT [apologetically]. I assure you I never meant--

DOYLE. Oh, don't apologize: it's quite true. I daresay I've
learnt something in America and a few other remote and inferior
spots; but in the main it is by living with you and working in
double harness with you that I have learnt to live in a real
world and not in an imaginary one. I owe more to you than to any
Irishman.

BROADBENT [shaking his head with a twinkle in his eye]. Very
friendly of you, Larry, old man, but all blarney. I like blarney;
but it's rot, all the same.

DOYLE. No it's not. I should never have done anything without
you; although I never stop wondering at that blessed old head of
yours with all its ideas in watertight compartments, and all the
compartments warranted impervious to anything that it doesn't
suit you to understand.

BROADBENT [invincible]. Unmitigated rot, Larry, I assure you.

DOYLE. Well, at any rate you will admit that all my friends are
either Englishmen or men of the big world that belo