proceeded, "and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little
nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of
air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that
is always a bad thing."

"I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless
spells," said Theron. "She said that then she banged on her piano at
all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild
woman. A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?"

Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. "What, our Celia?"
he said. "Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the
world. She is as unique as--what shall I say?--as the Irish are among
races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she--she
might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly
rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of
atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in
Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled
off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their
own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the
outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the
Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and
rooted their whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it;
their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.
The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the
merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile,
the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the
most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible
contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia,
I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them