With Madame Gonne-McBride, once called the most beautiful woman in Europe, Sylvia Pankhurst, and the sister, of Robert Barton, I entered the big house on Stephen’s Green.  Modern splashily vivid wall coloring.  Japanese screens.  Ancient carved madonnas.  Two big Airedales thudded up and down in greeting to their mistress.  I spoke of their unusual size.

Madame Gonne-McBride, taking the head of one of them between her hands:  “They won’t let any one arrest me again, will they?”

She is tall and slim in her deep mourning—­her husband was killed in the rebellion of 1916.  Her widow’s bonnet is a soft silky guipure lace placed on her head like a Red Cross worker’s coif.  On the breast of her black gown there hangs a large dull silver cross.  Beggars and flower-sellers greet her by name.  It is said that a large part of her popularity is due to her work in obtaining free school lunches.  Anyway, there was great grief among the people when she was thrown into jail for supposed complicity in the unproved German plot.  The arrest, she said, came one Sunday night.  She was walking unconcernedly from one of George Russell’s weekly gatherings, when five husky constables blocked the bridge road and hurried her off to jail.  At last, on account of her ill health, she was released from prison—­very weak and very pale.

Enter seventeen-year-old Sean McBride.  Places back against the door.  Blue eyes wide.  Breathlessly:  “They’re after Bob Barton and Michael Collins.  They’ve surrounded the Mansion House.”

Hatless we raced across Stephen’s Green—­that little handkerchief of a park that never seemed so embroidered with turns and bridges and bandstands and duck ponds before.  Through the crowd that had already gathered we edged our way till we came to the double line of bayonets and batons that guarded the entrance to Dawson street.  Over the broad, blue shoulder of the policeman directly in front of me, I glimpsed a wicked-looking little whippet tank with two very conscious British officers just head and shoulders out.  Still further down were three covered motor lorries that had been used to convey the soldiers.

Sean, for the especial benefit of constable just ahead:  “Wars for democracy and small nations!  And that’s the only way they can keep us in the British empire.  Brute force.  Nice exhibition for the American journalists in town.”

Constable stalked Sean back to edge of crowd.  Sean looked at him steadily with slight twinkle in his eye.  Miss Barton, Miss Pankhurst, and I climbed up a low stone wall that commanded the guarded street, and clung to the iron paling on top.  Sean came and stood beneath.

Miss Pankhurst, regarding crowd in puzzled manner:  “Why do you all smile?  When the suffragists were arrested we used to become furious.”

Sean looking up at her in kindly manner in which old rebel might glance at impatient young rebel:  “You forget.  We’re very used to this.”