Mangan shows you the old Dublin as it was in those glorious times, and in the new Dublin of to-day the shade of Mangan seems still to walk arm in arm with the shade of Mathurin. Gloomy ghosts addicted to melancholy, noting with satisfaction that the streets are as dirty as ever, the old Public Houses still standing, that, despite the tramways—those extraordinary new modern inventions—the tide of life runs pretty much the same as of old. The ghosts of Mangan and Mathurin have never seen a taxi cab.

Dublin at the present day is a splendid city for old ghosts to wander in without having their corns 68 trodden on or their susceptibilities injured. Phyl had come to Dublin to live with the Hennesseys in Merrion Square.

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“Never shall my door be shut on you except behind your back,” Hennessey had said, and he meant it.

The girl was worth several thousand a year; had she been penniless it would have been just the same.

You may meet many geniuses in your journey through life, many brilliant people, many beautiful people, many fascinating people, but you will not meet many friends. Hennessey belonged to the society of Friends, his wife was a member of the same community, and he would have been ruined only for his partner Niven, who was an ordinary lowdown human creature who believed in no one and kept the business together.

On the day of her arrival at Merrion Square and during her first interview with Mrs. Hennessey in the large, cheerless drawing-room where decalcomanied flower pots lingered like relics of the Palæolithic age of Art, Phyl kept herself above tears, just as a swimmer keeps his head above water in a choppy sea.

It was all so gloomy, yet so friendly, that the mind could not openly revolt at the gloom; it was all so different from the wind and trees and freedom of Kilgobbin, and Mrs. Hennessey, whom she had only seen once before, was so different, on closer acquaintance, from any of the people she had hitherto met in her little world.

Mrs. Hennessey, with a soul above dust and housekeeping, a faded woman, not very tidy, with 69 an exalted air, pouring out tea from a Britannia metal ware teapot and talking all the time about Willy Yeates, the Irish Players and Lady Gregory’s last play, fascinated the girl, who did not know who Willy Yeates was and who had never seen the Irish Players.

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