Gregory's and Yeats', and the art of the
players. But it is merely silly to talk about the soil and whitewashed
cottages, and self-revelation of peasant souls. Neither the dramatists
nor the players are peasants or ever were. They are very clever,
sometimes more than clever, members of the educated classes, who see the
peasants from outside just as I see them, as Mrs. Ascher would see them
if she ever got near enough to what she calls the soil to see a peasant
at all.

When Mrs. Ascher had finished with the Irish Players she went on,
still in a white heat of excitement, to the attempt to revive the Irish
language.

"Where else," she said, "will you find such devotion to a purely
spiritual ideal? Here you have a people rising enthusiastically to fight
for the preservation of the national language. And its language is
the soul of a nation. These splendid efforts are made in defiance of
materialism, without the remotest hope of gain, just to keep, to
save from destruction, a possession felt instinctively to be the most
precious thing of all, far above gold and rubies in price."

"The only flaw in that theory," I said, "is that the people who still
have this most precious possession don't want to keep it in the least.
Nobody ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest
interest in their language. The whole revival business is the work of an
English-speaking middle class, who never stop asking the Government to
pay them for doing it."

That was the second occasion on which I came near quarrelling with Mrs.
Ascher. Yet I am not a man who quarrels easily. Like St. Paul's friends
at Corinth, I can suffer fools gladly. But Mrs. Ascher is not a fool.
She is a clever woman with a twist in her mind. That is why I find
myself saying nasty things to her now and then. I suppose it was Gorman
who taught her to be an Irish patriot. If she had been content to follow
him as an obedient disciple, I should have put up with all she said
politely. But, once started by Gorman, she thought out Ireland for
herself and arrived at this amazing theory of hers, her artistic
children of light in death grips with mercantile and manufacturing
materialists. No wonder she irritated me.

Ascher saved us from a heated argument. Dinner was over. He had smoked
his half cigarette. He rose from his chair.

"I expect Mr. Wendall is waiting for us," he said to Mrs. Ascher.

Her face softened as he spoke. The look of fanatical enthusiasm