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had also given her a twinkle for which her husband should have praised heaven thrice daily. This he did not, but played a very average game of golf with an unvarying steadiness which frequently laid low many a brilliant player whose domestic craft sailed in more troubled waters.

"Go on, Marjorie, lazy child!" Joan pushed Marjorie through the window on to the verandah. Marjorie turned, her face showing white in the twilight without.

"Joan, hadn't he better be left? has been so-so tired all day."

He

Joan frowned. The twinkle gone, she seemed a woman years older, with worried lines on her forehead.

"No, we can't let him brood. Marjorie, don't let him sit and think. Half the troubles of the world come from it. You will be able to do something. I, a sister, would get the boot at my head."

The smile was back in its place now, recalled instantly to greet the stolid partner of Joan Crawford's joys and sorrows. It always had been ready to greet him, but behind the smile lay racking anxiety. Joan had blundered. Unlike most women, she never evaded the unpleasant facts of life, because "they were really too dreadful, you know." It was she who had urged on Marjorie's visit. Now she faced the results of that visit.

Outside Marjorie paused to take in the scent of the dear growing things, that had grown and bloomed to God's greater glory through the day, and now filled the garden with the scents of paradise at night. But in her heart was a black foreboding. The doctors, his sister, had been plain with her had warned her that anything might occur after such an illness as Ralph's.

She had come prepared to exercise tact and patience, to forgive all defects of manner. All she had to meet was

a gentle courtesy, which froze her enthusiasm; a painstaking, careful consideration of her wants and herself which chilled her to the marrow. All she asked, all she desired, with a desire that seemed as if it would break her heart with its force, was to break down these barriers, to find and meet the masterful, self-absorbed lover she had known, to give again of her best with the royal generosity found only in the very proud or the very simple.

She threw back her head, swift resolve hardening the lines of her face. It was not merely desire to go back to work, it was not only brooding over the loss of life and injury to the crew and boat under his command; something else had hindered, was hindering, Ralph's long convalescence.

Once and for all she would know what was in his mind.

Then the scents and sounds of the night rose up to comfort her. Child of the open air and wind as she was, Marjorie's black forebodings fell from her at the soft touch of the night. She went forward, the light of a great love shining in her eyes.

"Ralph!" she called.

The black figure silhouetted against the gray background stirred, and from its fingers dropped a cigarette.

The man's face, tired, white, drawn with efforts of a worried brain flogged on by a strong will, to regain the recollection of facts and feelings wiped from his mind as figures from a slate. flinched. The eyebrows puckered in a frown of nervous irritability. Marjorie's dress caught on the twisted branch of a Gloire de Dijon. She bent to loosen it. Linton's voice came to her in a dull, weary whisper.

"Oh, Lord, that girl again!"

Marjorie stooped lower over her dress. The bough sprang back, and she straightened herself. Linton was upon her. He had got up hurriedly; it had struck him she might have over

heard. But gray eyes looked steadily into his face.

"Ralph, this dress is torn. I must go up and change it. I shan't be long." With quick, light steps she was through the drawing-room. At the door she turned.

"Joan, we must have some bridge when I come down again."

Spoiled child all her life, in the old Yorkshire vicarage one law had been unflinchingly enforced. To allow her own sorrow or disappointment to affect her courtesy or consideration for strangers was, Marjorie the child had been made to feel, a disgrace. Marjorie the woman, in her hour of direst need, reaped the benefit of that training.

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The woman looked at him. "She will not get over it," she said slowly. "She is a Henley. They don't get over things; they shut themselves up." pause; she looked into the fire. "She will shut me out," she spoke very softly.

"Ah!" The doctor turned quickly and upset Augustus curled against his legs. "Ah, that is what she must not do! Look here, Mrs. Henley, Nature has taken her toll, that is all. Linton has come through this illness marvellously. He has lived where most men would have certainly died or lost their reason. But something had got to go. What has gone is his love for Marjorie,

and his memory of that love. He never really, I believe, had the slightest recollection of their engagement. But he has his letters show it, his actions prove it done his best to keep her to the engagement, to force the growth of an affection he did not feel. You know it was merely a chance remark, overheard, that occasioned his selfbetrayal. Neither before, or since has he shown any desire, save one, that Marjorie should not suffer."

"Pretend to my Marjorie!" Mrs. Henley's voice was in italics of scorn. "It was a noble pretence." The doctor picked up a shawl and placed it over the woman's stooping shoulders. "Marjorie must face facts, and live out her life. These proud people won't face 'em, so," he shrugged his shoulders, "they spoil their lives." He stopped. In the shadows his face twisted; the season for facing facts was still with him. Now he held out bis hand.

"Good-bye," he said more gently. "Remember, things are better as they are. I do not think that Linton's nervous organization would ever have stood the strain of marriage, and it is possible, probable, that that part of his memory will never return again."

The sound of wheels in the drive. They both started. The hall door opened. A white, weary woman walked in.

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men can do; there are some things few women leave undone.

Eleven, twelve, one. The clock chimed out the hours of the night. Downstairs an old woman crouched over a gray, long dead fire, the slow, difficult tears of old age rolling down her cheeks.

Upstairs a girl lay face downwards, teeth clenched, hands clasped round one of the pillars of her iron bedstead, her breath coming in short gasps of tearless agony. Her heart was breaking, but out of the furnace of a broken pride, a rejected love, would come a woman whose strong gentleness should be a help to many.

For the woman below there was no resurrection from the bed of her sorrow. Her child, her baby, was suffering, and she must stand aside and watch. The sword, the divine sword of motherhood, was turned in her heart, and she was too old for the wound to heal.

The first meet of the year, a gray sky still heavy with rain, a light wind from the west. Master, huntsman, and hounds were moving off to draw Denham Woods. The road was blocked with cars of varying degrees of rank and opulence, with horses wickering welcomes, as friend after friend of the hunting field joined the throng.

The doctor, disentangling himself from the central whirlpool, bumped against a small Roman-nosed man, whose mount would have fetched two hundred and twenty guineas at Tattersall's with ease. Apologizing for the fifteenth time, he was met with:

"Morning, doctor! How is the Grey?"

"Good morning, squire! Grey's very fit, thanks. Ah!" He turned. "Marjorie, it's good to see you out!"

"Bless my soul, Marjorie Henley!" exclaimed the Roman nose. "Roger." An ugly, clean-shaven young

man

moved up. "Roger, you know Miss Henley? Marjorie, you remember Roger?"

"Know him?" Marjorie at thirty was barely a good-looking woman, but her eyes and smile had not changed, since ten years ago she had hunted the same country with Linton by her side. "I chased him round the garden in pinafores. What ship are you in now, Roger? And are you home on leave?"

"The Australia. She's in the Home Fleet. Yes, I have got leave to marry my captain."

"Leave be blowed! Sailors are always ashore!" The Roman-nosed man was having a marked difference of opinion with his mount, hence shortness of temper.

"Who is your captain, Roger?" the doctor asked.

"Linton. Do you know him? One of the nicest

"Linton to be married! I didn't see the engagement announced." The doctor moved between Marjorie and the speaker.

"No. They met on Tuesday, he proposed on Wednesday, married on Saturday. He is going to China for two years, hence the hurry."

"Linton! 'Member Linton quite well. Wasn't he By Jove!" The owner of the Roman nose became a hot pink. "Pig-headed fool!" he remarked to his two hundred and twenty guineas mount, who at once recommenced hostilities of war.

"I knew Captain Linton well years ago." Marjorie's voice was quite steady, but in the strong morning light she looked every day of her thirty years.

"They're moving, Marjorie.

on!"

Come

"Coming, doctor." She turned to Roger. A lovely pink flush mounted to her face. "If Captain Linton ever speaks of Yorkshire will you tell him that you met some of his old friends

gone.

She was

in the East Riding, and that-that they good-looking woman when you see one. wish him the best of luck?" Run after a fluffy thing with tow hair. Humph!" His eyes rested on two figures in front. "Marjorie Henley takes her fences better than any woman I ever met. Roger, if you can't get any more out of that animal than that, we can either spend the night in this field, or get off and run!"

"Never thought Marjorie Henley pretty before." Roger hustled his decrepit and vulgar mount over a fence. "Humph!" grunted his uncle, who was mentally kicking himself. "Never thought you would. Young fools—all young fools together! Don't know a The Pall Mall Magazine.

Dorothy MacKay.

THE SOUL OF THE IRISH.

The better you know a people, the less you will generalize about them. That is quite true; it is the first rule of travel and international relations. No single member of any country ever seems in the least like the accepted caricature that represents his race. But still we are driven to form some sort of general idea of other nations. We have not time to particularize or analyze very deeply. We want a symbol, a short-hand note, something that will call up the characteristics fairly well for the moment before we pass on. And so, when we hear of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and the rest, we rapidly form a composite picture, made up of all manner of dim memories and reports, to be used as a counter for the moment. It is true, the picture is not the same for all minds. The word "German," for instance, calls up one figure for a gentle philosopher, another for a shy musician, and quite a different one for the statesmen and editors who dread nought. But even statesmen and editors are obliged to generalize, like the rest of us, for otherwise they could never get through the amount of thinking they have to do.

And now that we are all brought up sharp against Ireland again, as we have been at brief intervals during eight centuries, we shall be driven to

LIVING AGE. VOL. LIV. 2852

decide what general picture the words "Irish" and "Irishman" suggests. The answer is more than usually difficult; it depends so much on the knowledge, and still more on the temperament of each. Our Irish guides to knowledge also contradict each other so eloquently. One imaginary portrait we have, happily, obliterated for ever. The comic Irishman, with battered hat, breeches, swallow-tail coat, and knobstick, has gone. Silly, warm-hearted, honest, funny, just the man to rescue the innocent heroine in extremes-even Drury Lane knows him no more. If he ever existed, the famine killed him sixty-six years ago, and all the galleries of melodrama are left lamenting. Till the beginning of this century one was kept by the hotel-keepers near Killarney, just as a chamois is kept in the Schweizerhof; and it was a fine thing he made of it, firing appropriate remarks at the British tourists. But now he enjoys the Old Age Pension, and regards the English visitor much as a retired brigand regards the passing caravan. That generalization is wiped out, thank Heaven! and with it has gone the shrewish, slatternly, draggle-tailed, shrill-tongued female who did duty for Ireland next, though that was the only duty she ever did. She flourished in her pigsty about the time when English self-righteousness flourished in its

shop, factory, and chapel-about the time when statesmen and historians beslavered the Anglo-Saxon with wonder, and we could only account for our super-eminence on earth by tracing our descent from the Lost Ten Tribes of the Chosen People.

Matthew Arnold killed our self-righteousness. His "Wragg is in custody" settled it. And then he went on to clear away that dirty libel against the Irish race. To him more than to anyone England owes her next imaginary portrait of that eternal "Sister Isle." For us he created the Celt, and admiration, still mingled with a satisfactory sense of our practical superiority, grew from year to year. Let us recall the familiar words in which he sketched the Celtic temperament:

"Sentiment," he said, "is the word which marks where the Celtic races touch and are one; sentimental, if the Celtic nature is to be characterized by a single term, is the best term to take. An organization quick to feel impressions, and feeling them very strongly; a lively personality, therefore, keenly 'sensitive to joy and to sorrow; this is the main point. The expan

sive, eager Celtic nature; the head in the air, snuffing and snorting; a proud look and a high stomach, as the Psalmist says, but without any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems to impute by these words. For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground than the German. The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not so much the vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and excitement; he is truly, as I began by saying, sentimental. Sentimental 'always ready to react against the despotism of fact'; that is the description a great friend of the Celt (M. Henri Martin) gives of him; and it is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of success."

The history of that word "senti

mental" is of great interest, so closely does it reflect the changes in our national thought and politics. Since Matthew Arnold's time it has degenerated. For fifteen years past, Imperialists and Mr. Kipling's disciples (the truest sentimentalists) have used it in scorn for any emotion or sense of justice, honor, pity, mercy, and common humanity that would not add to British possessions or cadge sixpence for the private pocket. It has become their constant epithet for unlucrative justice, and when we hear it now we may be certain that the man who uses it is about to recommend or perpetrate some peculiarly dastardly act of mingled violence, cowardice, and greed. But if we return to Matthew Arnold's meaning of the word, we may find in his application of it the origin of the almost passionate admiration with which the Irish nature, and especially the Irish art, were regarded among us after his death. A week or two ago, we noticed how, under this new conception of Ireland, her spiritual attraction became irresistible to such natures as Lionel Johnson's, himself no more a Celt than the rest of us Englishmen; though, happily, that is much. We said that, in his eyes, the very name of Ireland was surrounded with a glimmering beauty. "The Mother of the Bleeding Heart," "the Mother with the crown of stars around her head," the "Rose of all roses, Rose of all the World," stirred a passion of devotion such as has been given to the VirginMother herself in the times of her persecution. She stood transfigured with the glory of suffering, consecrated by the halo of stupidity's hatred, encompassed by perils from the dulness that would reform her into a serviceable matron, and illuminated by gleams of ancient sacrifice and fresh self-sacrificing worship. The foul treachery of political intrigues, which time after time had dashed her hopes

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