That evening, after dinner, Mr. Quinn and John Marsh were sitting together. Henry had gone out of the room for a while, leaving Mr. Quinn to smoke a cigar while John Marsh corrected some exercises by the students of the Language class.

"Marsh!" Mr. Quinn said suddenly, after a long silence.

Marsh looked up quickly. "Yes, Mr. Quinn!" he replied.

"Henry's in love!..."

"Is he?"

"Yes. With that girl. Sheila Morgan, Matt Hamilton's niece!"

Marsh put his exercises aside. "Dear me!" he exclaimed.

There did not appear to be anything else to say.

"So I'm goin' to send him away," Mr. Quinn went on.

"Away?"

"Yes. I don't quite know where I shall send him. It's too soon yet to send him up to Trinity. I've a notion of sendin' you an' him on a walkin' tour in Connacht. The pair of you can talk that damned language 'til you're sick of it with the people that understands it!"

Marsh was delighted. He thought that Mr. Quinn's proposal was excellent, and he was certain that it would be very good for Henry to come into contact with people to whom the language was native.

"Wheesht a minute, Marsh!" Mr. Quinn interrupted. "I want to talk to you about Henry. It's a big thing for a lad of his age to fall in love!"

"I suppose it is."

"There's no supposin' about it. It is! He's just at the age when women begin to matter to a man, an' I don't want him to go an' get into any bother over the head of them!"

"Bother?"

"Aye. Do you never think about women, John Marsh?"

"Oh, yes. Sometimes. One can't help it now and then!..."

"No, begod, one can't!" Mr. Quinn exclaimed. "Do you know this, John Marsh, I never can make out whether God did a good day's work the day He made women! They're the most unsettlin' things in the world. You'd think to look at me, I was a fairly quiet sort of a steady man, wouldn't you? Well, I'm not. There's whiles when a woman makes my head buzz ... just the look of her, an' the way she turns her head or moves her legs. I'm a hefty fellow, John Marsh, for all I'm the age I am, an' I know what it is to feel damn near silly with desire. But all the same, I can keep control of myself, an' I've never wronged a woman in my life. That's a big thing for any man to be able to say, an' there's few that can say it, but I tell you it's been a hell of a fight!..."

He lay back in the chair and puffed smoke above his head for a while. "A hell of a fight," he murmured, and then did not speak for a while.

"Yes?" said John Marsh.

"I've been down the lanes of a summer night, an' seen young girls from the farms about, with fine long hair hangin' down their backs, an' them smilin' an' lovely ... an' begod, I've had to hurry past them, hurry hard, damn near run!... Mind you, they were good girls, John Marsh! I don't want you to think they were out lookin' for men. They weren't. But they were young, an' they were just learnin' things, an' I daresay I could have had them if I'd tried ... an' I don't think there's any real harm in men an' women goin' together ... but we've settled, all of us, that, real or no real, there is some sort of harm in it, an' we've agreed to condemn that sort of thing, an' so I submit to the law. Do you follow me?"

"No, not quite. Those sort of things don't arise for me. I'm a Catholic and I obey the Church's laws!..."

"I know you do. But I'm a man, not a Catholic!... Now, don't lose your temper. I couldn't help lettin' that slip out.... What I mean is this. There's a lot of waywardness in all of us, that's pleasant enough if it's checked when it gets near the limit of things, but there has to be a check!"

"Yes?" Marsh said. "And in my case the check is the Church, the expression on earth of God's will!..."

"Well, in my case it isn't. In my case it's my sense of responsibility as a gentleman. We've got ourselves into crowds that must be controlled somehow, and there isn't much room for wayward people in a crowd. That's why geniuses get such a rotten time. Now, my notion of a gentleman is a man who controls the crowd by controllin' himself. D'you follow me? He knows that the crowd'll bust up an' become a dirty riot if it's let out of control, an' he knows that he can influence it best an' keep the whip hand of it, if it knows that he isn't doin' anything that he tells it not to do. D'you see?"

"Yes," Marsh said. "That's the Catholic religion!..."

"I know as well as I'm livin'," Mr. Quinn went on, "that I have enough power over myself to know when to stop an' when to go on. That's been bred in me. That's why I'm a gentleman. But I know that if I let myself do things that I can control, I'll be givin' an example to hundreds of other people who aren't gentlemen an' can't control themselves ... don't know when to stop an' when to go on ... an' so I don't do them. An' that's a gentleman's job, John Marsh, an' when gentlemen stop that, then begod it's good-bye to a decent community. That's why England's goin' to blazes ... because her gentlemen have forgotten the first job of the gentleman: to keep himself in strict control, to be reticent, to conceal his feelings!"

But John Marsh would not agree with him. "England is going to blazes," he said, "because England has lost her religion. If England were Catholic, England would be noble again!..."

"Just like France and Spain and Italy," Mr. Quinn replied. "Bosh, John Marsh, bosh! I tell you, the test of a nation is this question of gentlemen!..."

"The test of a nation is its belief in God ... its church," said John Marsh.

"Well, Ireland believes in God, doesn't it? The Catholic Church is fairly strong here, isn't it? An' what sort of a Church is it? A gentleman's church or a peasant's church? Look at the priests, John Marsh, look at them! My God, what bounders! Little greedy, grubbin' blighters, livin' for their Easter offerin's, an' doin' damn little for their money. What do you think takes them into the church? Love of God? Love of man? No, bedam if it is. Conceit an' snobbery an' the desire for a soft job takes about nine out of ten of them.... Well, well, I'm runnin' away from myself. What I want to say is this: the Catholic church'll never be worth a damn in Ireland or anywhere else, 'til its priests are gentlemen. No church is worth a damn unless its priests are gentlemen!"

"But what do you mean by gentlemen, Mr. Quinn?"

"I mean men who are keepin' a tight hold on themselves. Mortifyin' their flesh ... all that sort of stuff ... so that they won't give the mob an excuse for breakin' loose!"

Marsh wondered why Mr. Quinn was talking in this strain and tried to draw him back to the subject of Henry's love of Sheila.

"I'm comin' to that," said Mr. Quinn, pointing his cigar at him. "Listen, John, there were two men that might have done big things in Irelan' and Englan'—Parnell an' Lord Randolph Churchill, an' they didn't because they weren't gentlemen. They couldn't control themselves. There isn't a house in Ulster that hasn't got the photographs of those two men in some album...."

"Parnell?" Marsh exclaimed.

"Aye, Parnell. Him an' Randy Churchill side by side in the one album! Lord bless me, John Marsh, the Ulster people took great pride in Parnell, even the bitterest Orangeman among them, because he was a man, an' not a gas-bag like Dan O'Connell. Of course, he was a Protestant!... But he couldn't keep from nuzzlin' over a woman ... an' up went everything. An' Randy Churchill ... I mind him well, a flushed-lookin' man.... I heard him talkin' in Belfast one time ... he bust up everything because he would not control himself. If he'd been a gentleman ... but he wasn't ... the Churchills never were.... Nor was Parnell. Well, now, I don't want Henry to go to bits like that. Henry's got power of some sort, John ... I don't know what sort ... but there's power in him ... and I want it to come out right. He's the sort that'll go soft on women if he's not careful. He'd be off after every young, nice-lookin' girl he meets if he were let ... an' God knows what the end of that would be. There's this girl, Sheila Morgan ... you've seen her?..."

Marsh nodded his head, and said, "She comes to the Language class."

"Well, you know the sort she is: fine, healthy, good-lookin', lusty girl. That sort stirs the blood in a lad like Henry. I want him to get into the state in which he can look at her an' lave her alone! Do you follow me?"

"Yes."

"He's not in that state now. He's soft, oh, he's damned soft. Look here, John Marsh, do you know what I think about young fellows? I think they're the finest things in the world. Youth, I mean. An' I figure it out this way, that Youth has the right to three things: love an' work an' fun; an' it ought to have them about equally. The only use of old people like me is to see that the young 'uns don't get the proportions all wrong, too much love an' not enough work, or the other way round. Henry's very likely to get them all wrong, an' I want to see that he doesn't. Now, you understand me, don't you? I'm a long-winded man, an' it's hard to make out what I'm drivin' at, but that can't be helped. Everybody has a nature, an' I have mine, an' bedam to it!"

"What do you want me to do?" Marsh asked, putting his exercises together.

"I want you to try an' put some big wish into his heart," Mr. Quinn replied. "Try an' make him as eager about Irelan' as you are. I want him to spend himself for something that's bigger than he is, instead of spendin' himself on something that's smaller than he is."

"But why not do that yourself, Mr. Quinn?"

Mr. Quinn got up from his chair and walked about the room. "It's very hard for a man to talk to his son in the way that a stranger can," he said. "An' besides I ... I love Henry, John Marsh, an' my love for him upsets my balance!"

"Can't you control that, Mr. Quinn?" Marsh asked.

"Control it! Begod, John Marsh, if you were a father you wouldn't ask such a damn silly question. Here, have a cigar! Henry's comin' back!"

When Henry entered the room, his father was lying back in his chair, puffing smoke into the air, while John Marsh was cutting the end of his cigar.

"The post's come in," he said.

"Anything for me?" his father asked.

"No. There was only one letter. For me. It's from Ninian Graham!"

"Nice chap, Ninian Graham," Mr. Quinn murmured.

"He wants me to go over to Boveyhayne for a while."

"Does he?"

"Yes. Gilbert Farlow's staying with them. I should like to go."

"Well, we'll see about it in the morning," said Mr. Quinn. "I was thinking of sending you on a walking tour with John here. To Connacht!"

"You could talk to the people in Irish, Henry," John added.

Henry twirled Ninian's letter in his fingers. "I'd like to go to Boveyhayne," he said. "I want to see Ninian and Gilbert again!..."

"But the language, Henry!..."

"I hate the damned language!" Henry exclaimed passionately. "I'm sick of Ireland. I'm sick of!..."

Mr. Quinn got up and put his hand on Henry's shoulder.

"All right, Henry," he said. "You can go to Boveyhayne!"