CHAPTER II. ON A GREAT HOPE.

I THINK you remarked that you had great hope of Woman,” said Harold, the next day. The boat had drifted once again into the centre of the same scene, and there seemed to be a likelihood of at least two of the boat’s company drifting back to the topic of the previous afternoon.

“Yes, you certainly admitted that you had great hope of Woman.”

“And so I have. Woman felt, long ago; she is beginning to feel again.”

“You don’t think that feeling is being educated out of her? I certainly have occasional suspicions that this process is going on. Why, just think of the Stafford girl. She can tell you at a moment’s notice the exact difference between an atheist, an infidel, an agnostic, a freethinker, and the Honest Doubter.”

“She has been reading modern fiction—that’s all. No, I don’t think that what is called education makes much difference to a woman. After all, what does this thing called education mean? It simply means that a girl can read all the objectionable passages of the ancient poets without the need of a translation. I have hope of Woman because she is frequently so intensely feminine.”

“Maybe you never heard tell of how the Widdy MacDermott’s cabin came to be a ruin,” said the Third.

“Feeling and femininity will, shall I say, transform woman into our ideal?” said Harold.

“Transform is too strong a word,” said Edmund. “And as for our ideal, well, every woman is the ideal of some man for a time.”

“And that truth shows not only how lowly is the ideal of some men, but also how unwise it is to attempt to speak of woman in the abstract. I begin to think that what you said yesterday had a grain of truth in it, though it was an epigram.”

“The Widdy MacDermott—oh, the Widdy Mac-Dermott,” said the Third, as though repeating the burden of a ballad. “They made a pome about her in Irish, that was near as full of nonsense as if it had been in the English. You see when Tim, her husband, went to glory he left the cow behind him, taking thought for the need of his widdy, though she hadn’t been a widdy when he was acquainted with her. Well, your honours, the byre was a trifle too near the edge of the bog hole, so that when one end fell out, there wasn’t much of the mud walls that stood. Then one blessed morning the childer came running into the cabin to tell their mother that the cow was sitting among the ruins of its home.”

“A Marius of the farmyard,” remarked Edmund.

“Likely enough, sir. Anyhow, there she sat as melancholy as if she was a Christian. Of course, as the winter was well for’ard it wouldn’t do to risk her life by leaving her to wander about the bogs, so they drove her into the cabin—it was a tight fit for her, passing through the door—she could just get in and nothing to spare; but when she was inside it was warm and comfortable that the same cow made the cabin, and the childer were wondering at the end of a month how they could have been such fools as to shiver through the winter while the cow was outside.

“In another month some fine spring days came, and the cabin was a bit close and stuffy with the cow inside, and the widdy herself turned the animal’s head to the door and went to drive her out for exercise and ventilation. But the way the beast had been fed and petted told upon her, and by the Powers, if she didn’t stick fast in the doorway.

“They leathered her in the cabin and they coaxed her from outside, but it was all of no use. The craythur stood jammed in the door, while the childer crawled in and out of the cabin among her hind legs—the fore legs was half a cow’s length outside. That was the situation in the middle of the day, and all the neighbours was standing round giving advice, and calling in to the widdy herself—who, of course, was a prisoner in the cabin—not to lose heart.

“‘It’s not heart I’m afeard of losing—it’s the cow,’ says she.

“Well, your honours, the evening was coming on, but no change in the situation of affairs took place, and the people of the country-side was getting used to the appearance of the half cow projecting beyond the door of the cabin, and to think that maybe, after all, it was nothing outside the ordinary course of events, when Barney M’Bratney, who does the carpentering at the Castle, came up the road.

“He took in the situation with the glance of the perfessional man, and says he, ‘By the Powers, its a case of the cow or the cabin. Which would ye rather be after losing, Widdy?’

“‘The cabin by all means,’ says she.

“‘You’re right, my good woman,’ says he. ‘Come outside with you.’

“Well, your honours, the kindly neighbours hauled the widdy outside over the back of the cow, and then with a crowbar Barney attacked the walls on both sides of the door. In ten minutes the cow was free, but the cabin was a wreck.

“Of course his lardship built it up again stronger than it ever was, but as he wouldn’t make the door wide enough to accommodate the cow—he offered to build a byre for her, but that wasn’t the same—he has never been so respected as he was before in the neighbourhood of Ballyboreen.”

“That’s all very well as a story,” said Edmund; “but you see we were talking on the subject of the advantages of the higher education of woman.”

“True for you, sir,” said Brian. “And if the Widdy MacDermott had been born with eddication would she have let her childer to sleep with the cow?”

“Harold,” said Edmund, “there are many side lights upon the general question of the advantages of culture in women.”

“And the story of the Widdy MacDermott is one of them?” said Harold.

“When I notice that gentlemen that come out in the boat with me begin to talk on contentious topics, I tell them the story of how the Widdy MacDermott’s cabin was wrecked,” said Brian.