There was a flame in her eyes—a response as urgent as his call.
“That’s what I’ve wanted too—all my life.”
The waitress at their table glanced at them impatiently. They dallied too long—this gawky, skinny, black haired young fellow and the girl in the dark blue cape. Making love, all right. She was a pretty girl too, but no style. All that heavy, yellow hair half slipping down her neck. She’d do with a bob.
She had a still greater impatience as she searched the table in vain for the tip they had forgotten.
II
The committee in the ante-room glanced cheerfully in at the crowd gathering for Gregory’s lecture. They had hoped for a big audience but it was a bad week. The town was full of the Convention delegates and in little mood for lectures, they had feared. But people came. Fully a thousand people had gathered to hear the lecture on Ireland and its Poetry.
They wondered a little at some of the people who bought tickets at the door—men whom they were sure never had attended any lecture under their auspices before. That was because they did not know that Gregory Macmillan’s name was one familiar to other circles than the literary poetic ones—that his vigor in the Irish Republican cause had been told even on this side of the Atlantic. There were those who would have come to hear a lecture of no other subject—Irishmen who had heard his name and subject announced at their meeting of the Knights of Columbus. The literary-minded, the students, the people who patronized the lectures of the Collegiate Alumnae as they did all semi-social affairs, sat side by side in the hall and watched Gregory as he came out from the faded wings at one side of the amateur stage.
Margaret Duffield, Carpenter, Helen and a rather unwilling Gage had adjoining seats. Gage had been extremely disrespectful in his characterization of the lecture, the society which gave it and the presumable character of the man who was to give it, especially as he learned that he was a friend of Margaret’s.
Yet it was Gage who enjoyed the lecture most. From the opening sentence it was clear that the discussion of Irish Poetry was to Gregory merely a discussion of Ireland. In Ireland to be a poet meant that one thought deeply enough to be a patriot. All his poets were patriots.
He made no specific indictment of England except as he read with passionate fervor the translation of Padraic Pearse from the old Irish—