the largest of the London Music Halls. Gorman's
play was, I suppose, to take its place in the usual way between an
exhibition of pretty frocks with orchestral accompaniment and an
imitation of the Russian dancers.

"I shall be there," I said, "on the first night. You can count on my
applause."

It occurred to me after Gorman left me that the revival of his play
offered me an excellent opportunity of entertaining the Aschers. Ascher
had been exceedingly kind to me in giving me letters of introduction to
all the leading bankers in South America. Mrs. Ascher had been steadily
friendly to me. I owed them something and had some difficulty about the
best way of paying the debt. I did not care to ask them to dinner in
my rooms in Clarges Street. My landlord keeps a fairly good cook, and I
could, I daresay, have bought some wine which Ascher would have drunk.
But I could not have managed any kind of entertainment afterwards. I did
not like to give them dinner at a restaurant without taking them on to
the theatre; and the Aschers are rather superior to most plays. I had
no way of knowing which they would regard as real drama. The revival of
Gorman's play solved my difficulty. I knew that Mrs. Ascher regarded him
as an artist and that Ascher had the highest respect for his brilliant
and paradoxical Irish mind. After luncheon I took a taxi and drove
out to Hampstead. I owed a call at the house in any case and, if Mrs.
Ascher happened to be at home, I could arrange the whole matter with her
in the way that would suit her best.

Mrs. Ascher was at home. She was in the studio, a large bare room at the
back of the house. Gorman was with her.

I saw at once that Mrs. Ascher was in a highly emotional condition. I
suspected that Gorman had been talking to her about the latest wrong
that had been done to Ireland, his Ireland, by the other part of Ireland
which neither he nor Mrs. Ascher considered as Ireland at all. On the
table in the middle of the room there was a little group on which Mrs.
Ascher had been at work earlier in the day. A female figure stood with
its right foot on the neck of a very disagreeable beast, something like
a pig, but prick-eared and hairy. It had one horn in the middle of its
forehead. The female figure was rather well conceived. It was appealing,
with a sort of triumphant confidence, to some power above, heaven
perhaps. The prick-eared pig looked sulky.

"Emblematic," said Gorman, "symbolical."

"The Ir