"You'll not go at all," she insisted.
"I will!"
"You will not, I tell you. What would a lump of a lad like you do in a place of that sort, where there's temptation and sin at every corner! Doesn't everyone know that the Devil's roaming up and down the streets of London day and night, luring young men to their ruin? There's bad women in London!..."
"There's bad women everywhere," John replied. "You don't need to be your age to know that!"
She listened angrily while John explained his point of view to his Uncle William. Travel and new experiences were necessary to the development of his mind.
"Don't you go up to Belfast every week!" Mrs. MacDermott interrupted.
"I was in Belfast yesterday," John retorted, "but there wasn't a thing happened to me, romantic or anything else!..." He stopped abruptly, smitten by the recollection of his meeting with Maggie Carmichael. After all, that was a romantic adventure! Most strange that he had not thought of his love affair in that way before! Of course, it was a romantic adventure! He had walked straight out of a dull street, you might say, into an enchanted café ... and had found Maggie in captivity, waiting for him to deliver her from it. She had been lonely ... and he had come to comfort her. He had taken her from that dull, cheerless ... prison ... you could call it that!... and had taken her to a pleasant place and made love to her! Oh, but of course it was a romantic adventure, with love and a beautiful golden-haired girl at the end of it. And here he was, moping over the misadventure of a manuscript and talking of travel in distant places in search of exciting experiences as if he had not already had the most thrilling and wonderful adventure that is possible to a man! Why, if he were to leave Ballyards and go to London, he would lose Maggie ... would not see her again!... By the Holy O, his mother was right after all! Women were right sometimes! There was plenty of romance and adventure lying at your hand, if you only took the trouble to look for it. Mebbe... mebbe a thing was romantic or not romantic, just according to the way you looked at it. One man could see romance in a grocer's shop, and another man could not see romance anywhere but in places where he had never been!...
"Mebbe you're right, ma," he said.
Mrs. MacDermott looked suspiciously at him. "You changed your mind very quick," she said.
"I always change my mind quick," he replied.