Some of his stories dealt with more civilized life. He delighted Miss Goold with an account, not at all unfriendly, of the humours of the third battalion of the Connaught Rangers. He quoted one of Mary O’Dwyer’s poems to her, and pleased Hyacinth by his enthusiastic admiration of the Connemara scenery. Good food, good wine, and a companion like Captain Quinn, gladden the heart, and the little party was very merry when Ginty deposited coffee and cigarettes and finally departed.
In Miss Goold’s house it was not the custom for the ladies to desert the dinner-table by themselves. Very often the hostess was the only lady present, and she had the greatest dislike to leaving a conversation just when it was likely to become really interesting. Moreover, Miss Goold smoked, not because it was a smart or emancipated thing to do, but because she liked it, and—a curious note of femininity about her—she objected to her drawing-room smelling of tobacco.
When Ginty had disappeared, and the serious business of enjoying the food was completed, the talk of the party turned on the South African campaign and the prospects of the Irish volunteers. Captain Quinn displayed a considerable knowledge of the operations both of the Boers and the British Generals. For the latter he expressed what appeared to Hyacinth to be an exaggerated contempt, but the two ladies listened to it with evident enjoyment. He delighted Miss Goold by his extreme eagerness to be off.
‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘why we shouldn’t start to-morrow.’
‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question,’ said Augusta Goold. ‘M. de Villeneuve arranged to send me a wire when he was ready for our men, and I can’t well send them sooner.’
‘Ah,’ said the Captain, ‘but it seems to me the Frenchman is inclined to dawdle. Don’t you think that if we went over it might hurry him up a bit?’
She agreed that this was possible, but represented the difficulty of keeping the men suitably employed in Paris for perhaps three weeks or a month.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘they are all right here in Dublin, where I can keep an eye on them. Besides, they have all got some sort of employment here, and I don’t have to pay them. I haven’t got money enough to keep them in Paris, and they won’t get anything from Dr. Leyds until you have them on board the steamer.’
Captain Quinn seemed satisfied, but later on in the evening he returned to the subject.
‘I can’t help feeling that it would be better for me, at all events, to go over to Paris at once. I shouldn’t ask to draw any pay at present. I have enough by me to keep me going for a few weeks.’