s. O'Donoghue and Vittie,
with a view to ingratiating themselves with the electors, wrote letters
to the papers solemnly declaring that they sincerely wished Lalage to
return. Nobody believed them. Lalage's teaching had sunk so deep into
the popular mind that nobody would have believed anything O'Donoghue and
Vittie said even if they had sworn its truth. Titherington, who was
beginning to recover, published a counter blast to their letters. He was
always quick to seize opportunities and he hoped to increase my
popularity by associating me closely with Lalage. He said that I had
originally brought her to Ballygore and he left it to be understood that
I was an ardent member of the Association for the Suppression of Public
Lying. Unfortunately nobody believed him. Lalage's crusade had produced
an extraordinary effect. Nobody any longer believed anything, not even
the advertisements. My nurse, among others, became affected with the
prevailing feeling of scepticism and refused to accept my word for it
that I was still seriously ill. Even when I succeeded, by placing it
against the hot water bottle in the bottom of my bed, in running up her
thermometer to 103 degrees, she merely smiled. And yet a temperature of
that kind ought to have convinced her that I really had violent pains
somewhere.

The election itself showed unmistakably the popular hatred of public
lying. There were just over four thousand electors in the division,
but only 530 of them recorded their votes. A good many more, nearly a
thousand more, went to the polling booths and deliberately spoiled their
voting papers. The returning officer, who kindly came round to my hotel
to announce the result, told me that he had never seen so many spoiled
votes at any election. The usual way of invalidating the voting paper
was to bracket the three names and write "All of them liars" across the
paper. Sometimes the word "liars" was qualified by a profane adjective.
Sometimes distinctions were made between the candidates and one of us
was declared to be a more skilful or determined liar than the other
two. O'Donoghue was sometimes placed in the position of the superlative
degree of comparison. So was I. But Vittie suffered most frequently in
this way. Lalage had always displayed a special virulence in dealing
with Vittie's public utterances. The remaining voters, 2470 of them or
thereabouts, made a silent protest against our deceitfulness by staying
away from the polling boot