stant principles. The
undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his assistant
while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have
supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to
me. But Mrs. Ascher did. Never before had I heard the problem stated as
she stated it.

"That," I said, "is an extraordinarily interesting way of looking at it.
The only difficulty I see is----"

"It is true," said Mrs. Ascher.

That was precisely my difficulty. It was not true. I went back to my
recollections of old Dan Gorman, a man as intensely interested in the
struggle as ever any one was. I remembered his great pot belly, his
flabby skin, his whisky-sodden face. I remembered his grasping meanness,
his relentless hardness in dealing with those in his power. The most
thoroughly materialised business man in Belfast has more spirituality
about him than old Dan Gorman ever had. Nor did I believe that his
son, Michael Gorman, would have accepted Mrs. Ascher's account of his
position. He would have winked, humourously appreciative of an excellent
joke, if any one had told him that he was a crusader, out to wrest the
sacred sepulchre of art from the keeping of the Saracens of Ulster.

I did not, of course, attempt to reason with Mrs. Ascher. There is
nothing in the world more foolish than trying to reason with a woman who
is possessed by a cause. No good ever comes of it. But Mrs. Ascher is
quite clever enough to understand a man even if he does not speak. She
felt that I should have been glad to argue with her if I had not been
afraid. She entered on a long defence of her position.

She began with the Irish Players, and the moment she mentioned them I
knew what she was going to say.

"The one instance," she said, "the single example in the modern world
of peasant art, from the soil, of the soil, redolent, fragrant of the
simple life of men and women, in direct touch with the primal forces of
nature itself. There is nothing else quite like those players and their
plays. They are the self-revelation, of the peasant soul. From the
whitewashed cabins of the country-side, from the streets of tiny,
world-forgotten villages, from the islands where the great Atlantic
thunders ceaselessly, these have come to call us back to the realities
of life, to express again the external verities of art."

That is all very well. I agreed with Mrs. Ascher thoroughly about the
art of Synge's plays, and Lady