And when Frances realized Michael’s dependence on Lawrence Stephen she was afraid.

“You wouldn’t be, my dear, if you knew Larry,” Vera said.

For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand Cameron’s place.

Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved.  It was a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object.  Stephen’s body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation for himself.

He justified his predilection on three grounds:  Ireland had been taken from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to love.  He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in Dublin.  And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn; he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get his own back in a thousand ways.  Living in England he would be a thorn in England’s side.

And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his talents and his temperament.  His enemies called him an opportunist:  but he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland produces in perfection.  For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny as itself.  Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father’s house.

He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner settled in Belfast.  His western Irish blood was steeled with this mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim where his people married.

Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have been formidable.  But one career alone did not suffice for his inexhaustible energies.  As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too wide a net and in too many waters.  He had tried parliamentary politics and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own.  And yet few men were more trustworthy.  He turned his back on the House of Commons and took to journalism.  As a journalistic politician he ran Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England.  Neither Nationalists nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief.  In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a novelist and an essayist.  He did everything so well that he was supposed not to do anything quite well enough.  Because of his politics other men of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more sincere.  His very distinction was unsatisfying.  Without any of the qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.