KATHARINE.  Well, who has a better right?  Be tired, my dear!  Give yourself up to it:  let everything else go, and just rest!  You are tired out.  That’s what I’ve been telling you.

PARNELL.  Too much to do yet.  Even dying would take more time than I can spare just now.

KATHARINE.  But you must spare time to live, my dear—­if you really wish to.

PARNELL.  Wish?  I never wished it more—­for now I am living.  I’m awake.  Doubts are over.

KATHARINE.  King ... look at me!  Don’t take your eyes away, till I’ve done....  One of those papers said (what others have been saying) that it was I ...  I ... need I go on?

PARNELL (with grim tenderness).  Till you’ve done:  you said ...

KATHARINE.  I—­that have ruined you.

PARNELL.  That’s just what they would say, of course.  It’s so easy:  and pleases—­so many.

KATHARINE.  All the same—­by mere accident—­mayn’t it be true?  It has happened, you know, sometimes, that love and politics haven’t quite gone together.

PARNELL.  Love and politics never do.  Do you think I’ve loved any of my party-followers:  that any of them have loved me?

KATHARINE.  Doesn’t—­O’Kelly?

PARNELL.  He’s gone now—­with the rest.

KATHARINE.  Didn’t Mr. Biggar?

PARNELL.  Dead....  No.

KATHARINE.  Still, you love—­Ireland.

PARNELL.  Not as she is to-day—­so narrow and jealous, so stupid, so blind!  Has she anything alive in her now worth saving?  That Ireland has got to die; and, though it doesn’t sound like it, this is the death-rattle beginning.  Ireland is going to fail, and deserves to fail.  But another Ireland won’t fail.  She’s learning her lesson—­or will learn it, in the grave.  Something like this was bound to come; but if it were to come again twenty years on, it wouldn’t count.  She’d know better.

KATHARINE.  Twenty years!  We shall be an old couple by then.

PARNELL.  In the life of a nation twenty years is nothing.  No.  Ireland was shaped for failure:  she has it in her.  It had got to come out.  Subjection, oppression, starvation, haven’t taught her enough:  she must face betrayal too, of the most mischievous kind—­the betrayal of well-meaning fools.  After that, paralysis, loss of confidence, loss of will, loss of faith—­in false leaders.  Then she’ll begin to learn.

KATHARINE.  Do you mean that everything has failed now?

PARNELL.  Yes; if I fail.  I’m not thinking of myself as indispensable:  it’s the principle.  That’s what I’ve been trying to make them understand.  But they won’t, they won’t!  Independence, defiance-they don’t see it as a principle, only as an expedient.  They may make it a cry, they may feel it as their right; but when to insist on it looks like losing a point in the game—­then they give up the principle, to become parasites!  That’s what is happening now.  It’s the slave in the blood coming out—­the crisis of the disease.  That’s why I’m fighting it:  and will, to the death!  And when—­when we are dead—­some day:  she’ll come to her senses again—­and see!  Then—­this will have helped.