"What! haven't you found that out yet? Don't try to put that on me. Don't a
girl know when she's pretty, without asking her neighbours?"
"Really, I never thought about it."
"More simpleton you. Old Mackaye has, at all events; though, canny
Scotchman that he is, he'll never say a word to you about it, yet he makes
no secret of it to other people. I heard him the other day telling some of
our friends that you were a thorough young genius."
I blushed scarlet, between pleasure and a new feeling; was it ambition?
"Why, hav'n't you a right to aspire to a college education as any
do-nothing canon there at the abbey, lad?"
"I don't know that I have a right to anything."
"What, not become what Nature intended you to become? What has she given
you brains for, but to be educated and used? Oh! I heard a fine lecture
upon that at our club the other night. There was a man there--a gentleman,
too, but a thorough-going people's man, I can tell you, Mr. O'Flynn. What
an orator that man is to be sure! The Irish AEschines, I hear they call
him in Conciliation Hall. Isn't he the man to pitch into the Mammonites?
'Gentlemen and ladies,' says he, 'how long will a diabolic society'--no, an
effete society it was--'how long will an effete, emasculate, and effeminate
society, in the diabolic selfishness of its eclecticism, refuse to
acknowledge what my immortal countryman, Burke, calls the "Dei voluntatem
in rebus revelatam"--the revelation of Nature's will in the phenomena of
matter? The cerebration of each is the prophetic sacrament of the yet
undeveloped possibilities of his mentation.
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