When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it was the Vortex, the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever do anything.
And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.
Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his Review. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would give a whole article to that book in his Review. If Michael's prose should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on the Review.
In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems were beginning to appear, one after another, in the Green Review. He had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year; they were better than those that Réveillaud had approved of two years ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in the Green Review.
Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he said, who would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.
And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence Stephen she was afraid.
"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.
For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand Cameron's place.
Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation for himself.
He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn; he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn in England's side.