my blood and broken my heart! But oh, my little girl, I've given you an Irish spirit and God loves the Irish'all's well with the world!

He kissed her and made way for a child in her little nightie with braids down her back, coming to say her belated prayers. The mother fondled the girl for a second and set her kneeling, as the Doctor paused on the stair landing and gazed beseechingly across the little figure. The woman looked for a moment at the man, then shook her head, and the Colonel from his post down the corridor heard the front door open and close and felt the night wind blowing through the house.

PART III

When the Nixons came home from Europe from their two years' sojourn in Europe the Professor brought back sundry medals, degrees and honourable parchments from the universities in what the Colonel called the effete and crumbling capitals of Europe. And the town was properly impressed. But Lalla Rookh, she that was born Longford, brought back seven trunk-loads of plunder. And she gave a series of exhibitions for her

corals from Naples and cameos from Florence, for her beaten silver and scarfs from Rome, for her prints from Germany, for her millinery from Paris and her silks from London.

Then too she slipped through the custom-house before the very eyes of the inspectors a series of poses, which she used in her home — for practice

- and when there was an audience, for applause; and these elaborate poses, that she had collected from the statuary of the museums, gave her such a classical effect that Archimedes spoke of her always as the Goddess of Longheath. From her face, which had taken form and colour from the galleries of Germany, it was obvious that she had some sort of notion that she was a kind of Madonna of the Clubs the federated clubs.

But the most important thing she brought was a large oversoul-like, say, crinoline- which she seemed to have picked up somewhere in the North Country. She showed her hardware and shelf goods and goddess effects to the women of the city federation; she displayed her dry goods and millinery and madonnas to the Monday Music Club; but she kept her oversoul for her more particular friends. She got it out one night for the old

Colonel, but he shook his grizzled head and cried:

"To hell with it, Lally! And while we're atalking, gel, let me break off a bit of my undersoul, which has been ingrowing for the two years I've been alone here with Archimedes downtown and the cat at the house; and you can as well take it now as any other time, and this is the size of it: Your first job in the cosmos is the kids! Your oversoul, spreading over the infinite and touchin' all the other gay young chips off the old block of primal energy or first cause or the billy-bedee of your moonshine, is all very grand; but the kids have their rights to a motherin'!"

66

But, Father, if a woman feels she has a higher mastery than—"

"Ah-h-h!" drawled the disgusted old man. "Lally, Lally, ye're like Paddy Mahone's dogyou're always goin' a bit of the way with 'em all and getting nowhere! Let me tell you something, daughter of my heart's core; and 'tis this: When the angels took the snip with the scissors that made you a woman, my darlin', they gave you the highest mastery in the world the transmission of the life-stuff of the race from the last generation to

the next. You're the vessel, my gel, wherein the destiny of the race is bilin'. It isn't merely your body that's important, wherein the seeds are warmed into life; though that's much and that's why you should treat it like God's temple. The important thing is your soul, for trimmin' and prunin' and pickin' and sortin' and choosin' and shieldin' and passin' into reality the dreams of today. I don't mind your votin' and your agitatin' to make a better world about ye for the settin' of your workshop; that's part of your job, too, and I glory in your spunk, gel. But your job's in your workshop as sure as the Lord's in His holy temple, and don't let this damn nonsense about soul hookin' you up with infinity tempt you away from a duty that makes you a part of God's plan of progress little or big, as you have the heart and the skill for it and as plain, Lally, as a boil on the back of your neck!"

your over

Whereupon Lalla Rookh went to the piano and played a movement from Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and thought of the Doctor, and tried to remember why she hated him, or if she did hate him at all, and if it wasn't a sort of hang-over hate from their disagreement on a lower plane where

he had been an unpaternal tomcat and eaten all the offspring in their first meeting in the jungle, or something equally important. For she was convinced that her consciousness here was but the reflection of the phenomena of time and space upon some small apex of her submerged soul that sank deep into a cosmic iceberg floating in the sea of infinity. So she was vastly more concerned about bumping into other icebergs and freezing to them spiritually, as it were, than she was about the area of reflection in the mundane sun. The Doctor, however, held a low opinion of the iceberg theory. He was devoting himself with some degree of consistency and great enthusiasm to going to hell by the drug route. He seemed to have no time for

Lalla Rookh and her cosmic theories.

So Mrs. Nixon went floating about as a goddess in her copious crinoline oversoul, touching a number of things that in reality did not exist! And the Nixon children's noses needed more or less attention, and their shoes went unsoled, and their little breeches were often sadly neglected. Now a handsome woman and no one ever held that her transcendental rigging made her the less handsome or dimmed in the slightest the gorgeous beef