Doyle [struck by this].  Ah! you hit the mark there, Tom, with true British inspiration.

Broadbent.  Common sense, you mean.

Doyle [quickly].  No I don’t:  you’ve no more common sense than a gander.  No Englishman has any common sense, or ever had, or ever will have.  You’re going on a sentimental expedition for perfectly ridiculous reasons, with your head full of political nonsense that would not take in any ordinarily intelligent donkey; but you can hit me in the eye with the simple truth about myself and my father.

Broadbent [amazed].  I never mentioned your father.

Doyle [not heeding the interruption].  There he is in Rosscullen, a landagent who’s always been in a small way because he’s a Catholic, and the landlords are mostly Protestants.  What with land courts reducing rents and Land Acts turning big estates into little holdings, he’d be a beggar this day if he hadn’t bought his own little farm under the Land Purchase Act.  I doubt if he’s been further from home than Athenmullet for the last twenty years.  And here am I, made a man of, as you say, by England.

Broadbent [apologetically].  I assure you I never meant—­

Doyle.  Oh, don’t apologize:  it’s quite true.  I daresay I’ve learnt something in America and a few other remote and inferior spots; but in the main it is by living with you and working in double harness with you that I have learnt to live in a real world and not in an imaginary one.  I owe more to you than to any Irishman.

Broadbent [shaking his head with a twinkle in his eye].  Very friendly of you, Larry, old man, but all blarney.  I like blarney; but it’s rot, all the same.

Doyle.  No it’s not.  I should never have done anything without you; although I never stop wondering at that blessed old head of yours with all its ideas in watertight compartments, and all the compartments warranted impervious to anything that it doesn’t suit you to understand.

Broadbent [invincible].  Unmitigated rot, Larry, I assure you.

Doyle.  Well, at any rate you will admit that all my friends are either Englishmen or men of the big world that belongs to the big Powers.  All the serious part of my life has been lived in that atmosphere:  all the serious part of my work has been done with men of that sort.  Just think of me as I am now going back to Rosscullen! to that hell of littleness and monotony!  How am I to get on with a little country landagent that ekes out his 5 per cent with a little farming and a scrap of house property in the nearest country town?  What am I to say to him?  What is he to say to me?

BROADBFNT [scandalized].  But you’re father and son, man!

Doyle.  What difference does that make?  What would you say if I proposed a visit to your father?

Broadbent [with filial rectitude].  I always made a point of going to see my father regularly until his mind gave way.