Strange to say the things she had laughed at had been the things which struck her feelings and sympathies.  Patrick’s notes here and there recalled conversations he had more listened to than taken part in between herself and Grace Barrow.  Who could help laughing at his ideas about women!  But if they were crude, they were shrewd—­or so she thought them; and the jejuneness was, to her mind, chiefly in the dressing of them.  Grace agreed with her, for Grace had as good a right to inspect the papers as she, and a glance had shown that there was nothing of peculiar personal import in his notes:  he did not brood on himself.

Here was one which tickled the ladies and formed a text for discussion.

’Women must take the fate of market-fruit till they earn their own pennies, and then they ’ll regulate the market.  It is a tussle for money with them as with us, meaning power.  They’d do it as little by oratory as they have done by millinery, for their oratory, just like their millinery, appeals to a sentiment, and to a weaker; and nothing solid comes of a sentiment.  Power is built on work.’

To this was appended:  ’The better for mankind in the developing process, ay, and a bad day for us, boys, when study masks the charming eyes in gig-lamps, and there is no pretty flying before us.  Good-night to Cupid, I fear.  May be I am not seeing far enough, and am asking for the devil to have the loveliest women as of old.  Retro S. M.’

The youthful eye on their sex, the Irish voice, and the perceptible moral earnestness in the background, made up a quaint mixture.

CHAPTER XVI

Of the great Mr. Bull and the Celtic and Saxon view of him:  And something of Richard Rockney

Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland, our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber.  The volcano we couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an armistice with the gastric juices.  Once more the personification of the country’s prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.  Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.

A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us and object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the idol, and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.

Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion, and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to your ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to abate.—­Of Bull, then:  our image, before the world:  our lord and tyrant, ourself in short—­the lower part of us.