grows older, and we can’t do much for her in that way,’ and off she goes in a temper. ‘Who’s the Aberdeens?’ says 77 she. ‘A lot of English without an Irish feather in their tails, and he opening the doors to visitors in his dressing gown—Castle,’ she says, ‘it’s little Castle there’ll be when we have a Parliament sitting in Dublin.’” 77 “I don’t want to go to parties at the Viceregal Lodge,” said Phyl, flushing to think of what a snob she had been when only a few days back she had criticised the Hennesseys and their set in her own mind. These honest, straightforward good people were not snobs, whatever else they might be, and if her desire for America had been prompted solely by the desire to escape from the social conditions that environed her friends, she would now have smothered it and stamped on it. But the call from Charleston that had come across the water to her was an influence far more potent than that. That call from the country where her mother had been born and where her mother’s people had always lived had more in it than the voices that carried the message. “Well,” said Hennessey, “you mayn’t want to go to parties now, but you will when you are a bit older. However, you can please yourself—Do you want to go to America?” “I do,” said Phyl. “It’s not that I want to leave you, but there is something that tells me I have got to go. When I read the letter first this morning, I was delighted to think that Mr. Pinckney was not still angry with me, and I liked the idea of the change, for Dublin is a bit dreary after Kilgobbin and—and well, I will say it—I don’t care for some of the people I have met in Dublin. But since then 78 a new feeling has come over me. I think it came as I was walking down here to the office. It’s a feeling as if something were pulling me ever so slightly, yet still pulling me from over there. My father said that there was more of mother in me than him. I remember he said that once—well, perhaps it’s that. She came from over there.” 78 “Maybe it is,” said Hennessey. 79 CHAPTER IX
Prev.
Back
Top