other eager fraternities. He was
unbeneficed, having no time for parish work. This ardent clergyman sat
at the other end of Aunt Phyllis's table, as befitted his years.

The space between the two ends was filled by younger creatures. It was
spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that
fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony,
free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either
about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the
years of the great war and those persons over military age who had not
been called upon to enter them, or about freedom; free love, free thought
and a free world. Yes, both these subjects sound a little old-fashioned,
but the Red House was concerned with these elemental changeless things.
And some of them also wrote fiction, quiet, grey, a little tired, about
unhappy persons to whom nothing was very glad or very sad, and certainly
neither right nor wrong, but only rough or smooth of surface, bright or
dark of hue, sweet or bitter of taste or smell. Most of those in the room
belonged to a Freudian circle at their club, and all were anti-Christian,
except an Irish Roman Catholic, who had taken an active part in the
Easter uprising of 1916, since when he had been living in exile; Aunt
Phyllis, who believed in no churches but in the Love of God; and of
course, Mr. Digby. All these people, though they did not always get on
very well together, were linked by a common aim in life, and by common
hatreds.

But, in spite of hate, the Red House lodgers were a happy set of
revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries; having their leaflets printed by
secret presses; members of societies which exchanged confidential letters
with the more eminent Russians, such as Litvinoff and Trotzky, collected
for future publication secret circulars, private strike-breaking orders,
and other _obiter dicta_ of a rash government, and believed themselves to
be working to establish the Soviet government over Europe. They had been
angry all this summer because the Glasgow conference of the I.L.P. had
broken with the Third International. They spoke with acerbity of Mr.
Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Snowden. But now, in August,
they had little acerbity to spare for anything but the government's
conduct of Irish affairs.

7

But, though these were Gerda's own people, the circle in which she felt
at home, she looked forward every