But Henry would not be drawn away from his argument.
"The atmosphere of the place is all wrong," he went on. "The Provost looks down the side of his nose at you if he thinks you take an interest in Ireland!"
Mr. Quinn, in his eagerness to defend his College from reproaches which he knew to be deserved, reminded Henry that the Provost had a considerable reputation as a Greek scholar, but his effort only delivered him more completely into Henry's hands.
"But, father," Henry said, "you yourself used to say what's the good of knowing all about Greece when you don't know anything about Ireland. I don't care about Greece and all those rotten little holes in the Ægean ... that's dead and done with ... but I do care about Ireland which isn't dead and done with!"
It was then that Mr. Quinn found consolation. "Well, anyway, you've learned to love Ireland," he said. "Trinity's done that much for you!"
"Trinity hasn't done it for me," Henry answered, "I did it for myself."
Lying back in his seat, waiting for the train to steam out of the station on its journey to Belfast, Henry remembered that conversation with his father, and his mind speculated freely on his attitude towards Trinity. "I don't care," he said, "if I never put my foot inside the gates again!"
Something that Patrick Galway said to him once, when he and John Marsh were talking of Trinity, came back to his memory. "The College is living on Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke," Galway said, and added, "It's like a maiden lady in a suburb giving herself airs because her great-grandfather knew somebody who was great. It hasn't produced a man who's done anything for Ireland, except harm, not in the last hundred years anyhow. Lawyers and parsons and officials, that's the best Trinity can do! If you think of the Irishmen who've done anything fine for Ireland, you'll find that, when they came from universities at all, they came from Oxford or Cambridge, anywhere on God's earth but Trinity. Horace Plunkett was at Oxford...."
"Eton, too!" Marsh had interjected.
"Yes, Eton!" Galway went on. "Think of it! An Irish patriot coming from Eton where you'd think only Irish oppressors would come from! If Plunkett had been educated in an Irish school and sent to Trinity, do you think he'd have done anything decent for Ireland?"