Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make some impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could get them out.

Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children, had time for the affairs of the nation.  She was a more intelligent woman than the Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago, informed herself of the affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming of the Times.  In the last four years the affairs of the nation had thrust themselves violently upon her attention.  She had even realized the Woman’s Suffrage movement as a vivid and vital affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the fighting and had gone to prison.

Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the Times, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn’t happen to prevent them.  At any rate she had no longer any reason to complain that nothing happened.

It was the Home Rule crisis now.  The fact that England and Ireland were on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael’s insurgent poem, “Ireland,” in the Green Review.

For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea.  He was hardly thirteen when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still.  His poem was the green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country.  Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the imminence of civil war (only that they didn’t really believe in it), when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else.  In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of Ireland’s freedom was a secret and solitary dream.  Nobody he knew shared it but Lawrence Stephen.  The passion he brought to it made him hot and restless and intense.  Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish crisis when she said, “I wish that Carson man would mind his own business.  This excitement is very bad for Michael.”

And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of them lived there.  If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two, Anthony and the boys would be out of it.

Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour.  There was, indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this particular affair of the nation; for Anthony’s business was being disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.

So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room.  He had even thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme measure was unnecessary.