“I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless spells,” said Theron.  “She said that then she banged on her piano at all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild woman.  A very interesting young lady, don’t you find her so?”

Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips.  “What, our Celia?” he said.  “Interesting!  Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the world.  She is as unique as—­what shall I say?—­as the Irish are among races.  Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she—­she might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly rather under-witted than otherwise.  She always impresses me as a sort of atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best.  There in Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines.  They brought with them at the outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism.  Others lost it, but the Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their whole spiritual side in it.  Their religion is full of it; their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.  The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her.  They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan.  These impossible contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood.  When I look at Celia, I seem to see in my mind’s eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them all.”

Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration.  “I love to hear you talk,” he said simply.

An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind.  Those were the very words that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days.  How curious it was!  He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially impressive masculine personality.  It was indeed strange that this soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and his feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and unique effect of virility.  No doubt this was a part of the great sex mystery which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest as with an atmosphere.  Women had always been prostrating themselves before it.  Theron, watching his companion’s full, pallid face in the lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest’s place, looking down upon these worshipping female forms.  He wondered what the celibate’s attitude really was.  The enigma fascinated him.

Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, and been eating.  He pushed aside his cheese-plate.  “I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race sometimes,” he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology.  “But I make up for it other times—­most of the time—­by scolding them.  If it were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.”