"People are not essential to true life," said Roger. "I believe that all perfect life is communion with God, conversation, that is, with ideas; 'godly conversation.' People are to some extent like thoughts, like living ideas; for the inner and the outer lives correspond."
"You mean that life is a kind of curve?" the lady interrupted. The question was a moral boomerang. She often used it defensively; she had once felled a scientist with it.
"Life is whatever you like to make it."
"I'm thinkin' of goin' to live in Ireland," said the lady. "The people must be so exquisitely charmin'. Such a beautiful life, sittin' round the fire, singin' the old songs. And then their imagination!"
"Their charm is superficial," said Roger. "Taking the times together, I've lived in Ireland for seven years. I have a cottage there. I do not think that you will sit round many fires, to sing old songs, after the first fine careless rapture, which lasts a month. I'm an Englishman, of course. When in Ireland I'm only one of the English garrison. I may be wanting in sympathy; but I maintain that the Irish have no imagination. Imagination is a moral quality."
"I don't think an Englishman can understand the Irish," said the lady.
"When an Irishman is great enough to escape from the littleness of his race, he becomes a very splendid person," Roger answered. "But until that happens he seems to me to be wanting in any really fundamental quality."
"Oh," said the lady, "you are talking so very like an Englishman. You aren't interested in life, I see. You are only interested in morals. But you cannot say that the Irish have no imagination. They have wonderful imagination. Look at the way they talk. And their writers: Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan. And their own exquisite Irish poets."
"I'd give the whole company for one act of Addison's Cato," said Roger. "Swift had a limited vision and a diseased mind. He diagnosed his own diseases. Goldsmith wrote some pretty verses. But I do not think that you have read them. Have you? Sheridan wrote a comedy at the age of twenty-four to prove that a sot is nobler than a scholar. Later, he tried to prove it in his own person. I do not read Irish. I have read translations from it. Its distinctive quality seemed to me to be just that kind of windy impersonality which one hears in their talk."
"That is so English of you," said the lady, laughing. "I think that I ought to be very thankful for my Celtic blood."