Going back easily to the heroic legends, on which, though blurred in their outline, his boyhood had been fostered by tellers of long-transmitted tales at a Connemara hearthside, he found the essential beauty and significance where more learned though less cultured readers have been bewildered by what seemed to them wild extravagances of barbarism.

She could have done it with a light heart then; there would have been a semblance of fight in it; but now now it could not be done. Logic, the pitiless solvent, has no action on those old long-transmitted instincts; it may argue with, but it cannot destroy, those vague yearnings of the natural man towards righteousness. Julia did not argue, she only obeyed; she did not know why.