Curious
_his_ having to back the conventions, eh?
KATHARINE. Why does he?
PARNELL. Because the political salvation of his party and its leader comes
before Ireland. He means well by her: but he doesn't mean it so much as
all that. Still he's the only one of them who doesn't pretend to look on
me as a black sheep. He too has to work with his material. That's
politics. The Nonconformist conscience means votes--so it decides him:
just as the priests decide me.... They would decide him in any case, I
mean. And so-so it goes on.... "Look here upon this picture, and on this":
Ireland trying to please England; England trying, now and then, to please
Ireland! I don't know which is the more ludicrous; but I know that both
equally must fail. And they've got to see it!--and some day they will. It
won't be "Home Rule" then....
(_So for a while he sits and thinks, his hand in hers. Then he
resumes._)
My ruin? What would my ruin matter anyway? Put it, that the making public
of our claim--our right to each other--is to be allowed by any possibility
to affect the cause of a nation--the justice of that cause: doesn't that
fact, if true, show that the whole basis of the political principles they
have so boasted, and on which we have so blindly relied, was utterly and
fantastically false and rotten? Haven't we, providentially, given the
world the proof that it needed of its own lie?
KATHARINE. We didn't give it, my dear.
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