t had suddenly halted and asked her
to marry him. It came on her with something like assurance that that
was the only business these men were there for, she could not discover
any other reason or excuse for their existence, and if some man had
been thus adventurous Mary Makebelieve would have been sadly perplexed
to find an answer: she might, indeed, have replied, "Yes, thank you,
sir," for when a man asks one to do a thing for him one does it
gladly. There was an attraction about young men which she could not
understand, something peculiarly dear and magnetic; she would have
liked to shake hands with one to see how different he felt from a
girl. They would, probably, shake hands quite hard and then hit one.
She fancied she would not mind being hit by a man, and then, watching
the vigor of their movements, she thought they could hit very hard,
but still there was a terrible attraction about the idea of being hit
by a man. She asked her mother (with apparent irrelevance) had a man
ever struck her; her mother was silent for a few moments, and then
burst into so violent a passion of weeping that Mary Makebelieve was
frightened. She rushed into her mother's arms and was rocked fiercely
against a heart almost bursting with bitter pride and recollection.
But her mother did not then, nor did she ever afterwards, answer Mary
Makebelieve's question.

IV

Every afternoon a troop of policemen marched in solemn and majestic
single file from the College Green Police Station. At regular
intervals, one by one, a policeman stepped sideways from the file,
adjusted his belt, touched his moustache, looked up the street and
down the street for stray criminals, and condescended to the duties
of his beat.

At the crossing where Nassau and Suffolk streets intersect Grafton
Street one of these superb creatures was wont to relinquish his
companions, and there in the center of the road, a monument of
solidity and law, he remained until the evening hour which released
him again to the companionship of his peers.

Perhaps this point is the most interesting place in Dublin. Upon one
vista Grafton Street with its glittering shops stretches, or rather
winds, to the St. Stephen's Green Park, terminating at the gate known
as the Fusiliers' Arch, but which local patriotism has rechristened
the Traitors' Gate. On the left Nassau Street, broad and clean, and a
trifle vulgar and bourgeois in its openness, runs away to Merrion
Square, and on w