But he did not send the letter to her. He had read it over before putting it in the envelope. "Hysterical," he said to himself, calmer now that he had vented his feelings. "That's what it is!"

He was about to tear it up, but before he could, do so, his mind veered again. "I'll put it away," he said. "I'll leave it until the morning, and read it again. Perhaps I'll think differently then. I ought to tell Mary. I can't go on just not joining, and letting her gradually suspect. I ought to go to her, and tell her straight out. When my book's done I'll go to her...."

"What sort of a man am I?" he said again. "Analysing myself like this ... turning myself inside out ... poking and probing into my mind!... Fumbling over my life, that's what I'm doing! Why don't I stand up to things? What's the meaning of me? What am I here for?"

If he could only strip himself to the marrow of his mind, if he could only see inside himself and know what was his purpose and discover the content of his being....

"I'm morbid," he said. "I'm too introspective. I ought to look out of myself. But I can't. It isn't my fault that my eyes are turned inwards. I'm made like that. I can't alter my make. I can destroy myself, but I can't alter my make....

"Perhaps," he thought, "if I were to take more exercise, if I were to go for long walks, I'd think less about these things. I'd get healthier notions. If I were to enlist, go into the ranks, and endure all that the men endure, that might make my mind healthier. All that drill and marching....

"But it's the spirit of me that's wrong," he muttered aloud. "It's not my body ... it's me!"

"I must work. I must work hard, and forget all this torturing!..."

He wrote furiously at his book, and gradually it came to its end. "I'll go down to Dublin again," he said, when it was finished "and see if I can't do something there that'll make me forget things!"

He stayed at Ballymartin until he had corrected the proofs of the new book, and then some business on the estate kept him at home for nearly another month. It was not until well in the New Year that he was able to leave home, and almost at the last moment he decided not to go to Dublin, but to travel from Belfast, by Liverpool, to Boveyhayne. Mary had asked him to spend Christmas with them, but he had made an excuse: estate business and his book; because he could not yet bring himself to tell her of his cowardice. He felt that when he did so, she would end their engagement, and he wished to keep her love as long as he could. He wrote to her very frequently, more frequently than she wrote to him, telling her of Irish affairs. She had had difficulty in understanding so many things, but she was eager to know about them. He had filled a letter with bitter complaint of the corruption in Irish civic life, and she had asked why he believed in Home Rule. "If you can't trust these people to manage a municipality, how can you trust them to manage a nation?" And he had written a lengthy epistle on the state of Ireland.

"You see, dear," he wrote, "it isn't reasonable to expect us to undo in a generation work which it took your country several centuries to do. Your people have steadily destroyed and corrupted my people. I know they're trying to make amends, but they mustn't expect miracles. You can't wave a wand over Ireland, and say 'Let there be light!' and instantly get light. You've got to remember that Ireland is populated largely by the dregs of Ireland ... what was left after your countrymen had persecuted and exiled and hanged the most vigorous and most courageous men we had ... and it'll take a generation or two, more perhaps, to get a decent level again. The most powerful man in Dublin at this minute is a haberdasher who owns almost everything there is to own: newspapers, conveyances and heaven knows what; and he has the mind of ... well, an early nineteenth-century mill-owner! John Marsh spends a deal of time in vilifying the English as a mean-minded people, but my God, he has only got to look round the corner in Dublin, to see mean-minded men by the hundred. He wrote to me the other day, crowing because his Volunteers had prevented the application of conscription to Ireland, and that's a frame of mind I don't understand. He's an idealist, but all his ideals are being employed to enable mean-minded and greedy men like the farmers to go on being more mean-minded and greedier. The principal argument seems to be that the Irishman must stay at home and make money out of the war. That's a long way from the days of the 'wild geese' and the order of chivalry, isn't it?

"I'm a Home Ruler because I want to see a sense of responsibility cultivated in these people, and you can't have a sense of responsibility until you've got something for which you are responsible. I don't doubt that out of this heart-breaking population, a decent-minded population will come. After all, the first settlers in Australia weren't much better than the people who control the Dublin Corporation, were they? If John Marsh had been about the world more, had had to manage things, and if Mineely and Connolly and the Dublin Labour people had not been embittered beyond all sanity of judgment by that haberdasher I mentioned earlier in this letter, they'd have been useful in the way that I want Crews and Jordan and Saxon and all those patient people to be useful.

"I wish you could meet Crews and Jordan and Saxon. They're very dissimilar, but they've got something like the unifying motive of a monastery, and they're willing to serve and to plod and to be patient. I fight with Saxon because he's a pacifist, but like all pacifists he's a very pugnacious person, and he can get frightfully angry, but it's pitiful to see him when he's been angry, because he's so sorry afterwards. I'm not a pacifist, but I haven't a tenth of his pluck. He'd endure anything, that man. Crews and Jordan are younger than he, and very brainy. Crews looks as if he were one of the Don't-Care-a-Damn Brigade ... Dublin's full of them ... but he does care. He has a curiously subtle brain, and I do not know any one so imperturbable as he is. He never loses his temper ... at least I've never seen him lose it ... except, so he says, with stockbrokers and haberdashers and that kind of rubbish. Jordan is one of the brainiest men in Ireland ... that, I suppose, is because he has got some English blood in him: a cynical-looking man, but that's all his fun. And he works, my goodness, he works!

"It's with men like these that I want to work, because I believe that they will prepare the place for the foundation of a decent commonwealth. They aren't miracle-mongers, thank God, like John Marsh and Galway and Mineely. They aren't up in the sky to-day and down in the mud to-morrow. They keep to the level.

"Then there's the Plunkett House lot. You remember, I told you about Sir Horace Plunkett and the Co-operative Movement. Well, I want to get Crews and Jordan and Saxon to link themselves on to the Plunkett House people and form the nucleus of a new Irish Group. There are a few of the men at Trinity College who will come into it, but I'm afraid all the men at the National University are under the influence of Marsh and MacDonagh and the sloppy romantics.

"You see, dear, don't you, that this job of making a commonwealth of worth in Ireland is a long and difficult one. That's why we've got to be very patient. Everything's against us. We have a contemptible press, a cowardly crowd of corrupt politicians, a greedy people, an ignorant and bigoted priesthood (that includes the Protestant clergy) and a complete lack of social consciousness and plan of life. But then, what's life for, if it isn't to cope with difficulties like that...."