Probably no one can have really known “Martin Ross” who did not spend some time in her company either in Connemara or West Cork. I, to my sorrow, only met her once, at a Dublin dinner table. That hour’s talk has left on my mind a curiously limited and even negative impression. She looked surprisingly unlike a person who spent much of her life in the open air; and it was hard to associate her with the riotous humour of many “R.M.” stories. What remains positive in the impression is a sense of extreme fineness and delicacy, qualities which reflect themselves in the physical counterparts of that restraint and sure taste which are in the essence of all that she signed.

That one meeting served me well, however, because out of it arose casually an intermittent correspondence which passed into terms of something like friendship. Once at all events I traded, as it were, on a friend’s kindness; for when a boy of mine lay sick abroad, and I was seeking for acceptable things to bring to his bedside, I wrote repeatedly to Martin Ross, provoking replies from a most generous letter-writer—letters very touching in their kindness.

But most of our communications had their source in the prompting which urged her to speak her mind to a Nationalist Member of Parliament, concerning happenings in Ireland. These letters show how gravely and anxiously she thought about her country, and events have written a grim endorsement on certain of her apprehensions. She was never of those who can be content to regard Ireland as a pleasant place for sport, full of easy, laughable people; or she would never have understood Ireland with that intensity which can be felt even in her humour. If her letters show that she was often angry with her countrymen, they show too that it was because she could not be indifferent to the honour of Ireland.

September, 1917.