uld converse with strangers. Marsh would talk
about himself and his poems and his work with an innocent vanity that
made people like him; but Henry, self-conscious and shy, could not talk
of himself or his intentions to any but his intimates. Sitting here, in
this carriage, from which, even now, he could see in the distance,
veiled in clouds, the high peaks of the Mourne mountains, he tried to
explain this difference between Marsh and himself. Why was it that these
Dublin men were so lacking in reticence, so eager to communicate, while
he and Ulstermen were reserved and eager to keep silent? He set his
problem in those terms. He identified himself as a type of the
Ulsterman, and began to develop a theory, flattering to himself, to
account for the difference between Dublin people and Ulstermen ... until
he remembered that Ernest Harper was an Ulsterman. Mr. Quinn had taken
Henry to see Harper on the first Sunday evening after they had arrived
in Dublin from England, and Harper had received him very charmingly and
had talked to him about nationality and co-operation and the Irish drama
and the strange inability of Lady Gregory to understand that it was not
she who had founded the Abbey Theatre, until Henry, who had never heard
of Lady Gregory, began to feel tired. He had waited patiently for a
chance to interpolate something into the monologue until hope began to
leave him, and then, with a great effort he had interrupted the flow of
Harper's vivid talk and had made a reference to a picture hanging on the
wall beside him. It showed a flaming fairy in the middle of a dark
wood....

"Oh, yes," Harper said, "that's the one I saw!"

"You saw?" Henry had exclaimed in astonishment.

And then he remembered that Harper spoke of fairies as intimately as
other men speak of their friends....

"Good God!" he thought, "_where am I?_" and wondered what Ninian Graham
would make of Ernest Harper.

Harper was an Ulsterman, and so was George Russell, whom people called
"A. E." Marsh and Galway, now almost inseparable, had taken Henry to
hear George Russell speaking on some mystical subject at the Hermetic
Club, and Henry, bewildered by the subject, had felt himself
irresistibly attracted to the fiery-eyed man who spoke with so little
consciousness of his audience. After the meeting was ended, he had
walked part of the way home with Russell and had listened to him as he
said the whole of his lecture over again ... and he left him with