KATHARINE.  This—­that if now you told me to go—­because it was for your good—­I’d go—­glad—­yes glad that you’d made me do for you, at last, something that was hard to do—­for the first time, dearest, for the first time!

PARNELL (deeply moved).  That so?  Not an accident, then, eh?

KATHARINE (embracing him).  Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!

PARNELL.  How true to life love makes everything!—­so clear and straight—­ looking back now.  Through you I’ve learned this truth at any rate—­that there are two things about which a man must never compromise—­first his own soul, the right to be himself—­no matter what others may think or do.

KATHARINE.  And the other?

PARNELL.  His instinct, of trust or distrust, in the character of others.  I hadn’t any real doubt, but I compromised with instinct to gain my end:  did things I didn’t believe were any good—­accepted the word of men I didn’t trust.  Home Rule itself was a compromise that I made myself accept.  But I never really believed in it.  For you can’t limit the liberty of a nation, if it’s really alive.  Then came the smash—­that woke me.  And that I was awake at last our love came to be the proof...Something different has got to be now.  Ireland will have to become more real—­more herself, more of a rebel than ever she has been yet.  If, thirty years hence, my failure shall have helped to bring that about—­an Ireland really free—­then I’ve won....

(The words come quietly, confidently; but it is the voice of an exhausted man, whose physical resources are nearly at an end.  For a long time he sits quite still, holding his wife’s hand, saying nothing, for he has nothing more to say.  A high screen behind the couch on which they rest cuts off the gaslight; only the firelight plays fitfully upon the two faces.  Suddenly the brightness falls away, and over that foreshadowing of death, now only three days distant, the scene closes.)

The Man of Business

Dramatis Personae

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN (Ex-Minister)
JESSE COLLINGS (His Friend)
A DISTINGUISHED VISITOR
A NURSE

The Man of Business

SCENE:  Highbury.  August 1913.

Between double-doors, opening from living-room to conservatory, sits the shadow of the once great and powerful Minister, State Secretary for the Colonies.  To the dark, sombre tones of the heavily furnished chamber the gorgeous colours of the orchids, hanging in trails and festoons under their luminous dome of glass, offer a vivid contrast.  Yet even greater is that which they present to the drawn and haggard features of the catastrophically aged man whose public career is now over.  In wheeled chair, with lower limbs wrapped in a shawl and supported by a foot-rest, he sits bent and almost motionless; and when he moves