I have come to what must be the final chapter, and the thought most present with me is that in writing it I am closing the door on these memories of two lives that made the world a pleasant place for each other, and I find now that although I began them with reluctance, it is with reluctance still that I must end them.

It has been hard, often, to leave untold so many of those trivial things that counted for more, in the long run, than the occasional outstanding facts of two quite uneventful lives. I fear I have yielded too much to the temptation of telling and talking nonsense, and now there remains only the Appendix in which to retrieve Martin’s character and mine for intelligence and for a serious concern for the things that are serious.

To return to our work, which for us, at all events, if for no one else, was serious. As soon as we had recovered from “Dan Russel,” Martin set forth on what I find entered in my diary as “a series of tribal war-dances round the County Galway,” which meant that she paid visits, indefatigably, and with entire satisfaction, in her own county and among her own allies and kinsfolk. I should like to quote her account of a visit to one of her oldest friends, Lady Gregory, at Coole Park, where she met (and much enjoyed meeting) Mr. W. B. Yeats, and where she, assisted by the poet, carved her initials on a tree dedicated to the Muses, whereon A. E., and Dr. Douglas Hyde, and others of high achievement had inscribed themselves. But I must hold to the ordinance of silence as to living people that she herself ordained and would wish me to observe.

No one ever enjoyed good company more than Martin, and, as the beggars say, she “thravelled the County Galway,” and there was good company and a welcome before her wherever she went.

At about this time she and I were invited to a public dinner in Dublin, given to Irish literary women by the Corinthian Club; and, having secured exemption from speech-making, we found it a highly interesting entertainment, at which were materialised for us many who till then had been among the things believed in but not seen. At this time also, or a little later, I re-established the West Carbery Hounds, after a brief interregnum. I only now allude to them in order to record the fact that when the first draft of the reconstituted pack arrived, the lamented “Slipper” (now no more) met them at the station with an enormous bouquet of white flowers in a cavity in his coat that might have begun life as a button-hole, and a tall hat. He cheered the six couples as they left the station yard (accompanied, it may not be out of place to mention, ridiculously, by two and a half gambolling couples of black and white British-Holstein young cattle, on a herd of which magpie breed my sister and I were embarking), and then, as the procession moved like a circus through the streets of Skibbereen, “Slipper” renewed the task of drinking all their healths, this time at my expense.

The doctrine that sincere friendship is only possible between men dies hard. It is, at last, in the fulness of time, expiring by force of fact, and is now, like many another decayed convention, dragging out a deplorable old age in facetious paragraphs in “Comic Corners,” where the Mother-in-law, Mrs. Gamp and her ministrations, and the Unfortunate Husband (special stress being laid on the sufferings endured by the latter while his wife is enjoying herself upstairs) gibber together, and presumably amuse someone.

The outstanding fact, as it seems to me, among women who live by their brains, is friendship. A profound friendship that extends through every phase and aspect of life, intellectual, social, pecuniary. Anyone who has experience of the life of independent and artistic women knows this; and it is noteworthy that these friendships of women will stand even the strain of matrimony for one or both friends. I gravely doubt that had Jonathan outlived Uriah he would have seen much of David.

However, controversy, and especially controversy of this complexion, is a bore. As Martin said, in a letter to me,

“Rows are a mistake; which is the only reason I don’t fight with you for invariably spelling ‘practice,’ the noun, with an ‘s.’”

Martin had a very special gift for friendship, both with women and with men. Her sympathies were wide, and her insight into character and motive enabled her to meet each of her many friends on their own ground, and to enter deeply and truly into their lives, and give them a share in hers.

In spite of the ordinance of silence, I feel as if she would wish me to record in this book the names, at least, of some of those whom she delighted to honour, and, with all diffidence, I beg them to understand that in the very brief mention of them that will be found in the Appendix, I have only ventured to do this because I believe that she desires it.

I suppose it was the result of old habit, and of the return of the hounds, but, for whatever reason, during the years that followed the appearance of “Dan Russel the Fox,” Martin and I put aside the notions we had been dwelling upon in connection with “a serious novel,” and took to writing “R.M.” stories again. These, six couple of them (like the first draft of the re-established pack), wandered through various periodicals, chiefly Blackwood’s Magazine, and in July, 1915, they were published in a volume with the title of “In Mr. Knox’s Country.”

We were in Kerry when the book appeared, or rather we were on our way there. I remember with what anxiety I bought a Spectator at the Mallow platform bookstall, and even more vividly do I recall our departure from Mallow, when Martin, and Ethel Penrose, and I, all violently tried to read the Spectator review of Mr. Knox at the same moment.

* * * * *

I will say nothing now of the time that we spent in Kerry; a happy time, in lovely weather, in a lovely place. It was the last of many such times, and it is too near, now, to be written of.

I will try no more. Withered leaves, blowing in through the open window before a September gale, are falling on the page. Our summers are ended. “‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the Preacher.”

I have tried to write of the people, and the things, and the events that she loved and was interested in. It has been a happiness to me to do so, and at times, while I have been writing, the present has been forgotten and I have felt as though I were recapturing some of the “careless rapture” of older days.

The world is still not without its merits; I am not ungrateful, and I have many reasons that are not all in the past, and one in especial of which I will not now speak, for gratitude. But there is a thing that an old widow woman said, long ago, that remains in my mind. Her husband—she spoke of him as “her kind companion”—had died, and she said to me, patiently, and without tears,

“Death makes people lonesome, my dear.”

Finis.