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MRS O’FLAHERTY

[hilariously]. Let your honor alone for finding the right word! A big bosthoon he is indeed, your honor. Oh, to think of the times and times I have said that Miss Agnes would be my lady as her mother was before her! Didn’t I, Dinny?

SIR PEARCE

. And now, Mrs. O’Flaherty, I daresay you have a great deal to say to Dennis that doesn’t concern me. I’ll just go in and order tea.

MRS O’FLAHERTY

. Oh, why would your honor disturb yourself? Sure I can take the boy into the yard.

SIR PEARCE

. Not at all. It won’t disturb me in the least. And he’s too big a boy to be taken into the yard now. He has made a front seat for himself. Eh? [He goes into the house.]

MRS O’FLAHERTY

. Sure he has that, your honor. God bless your honor! [The General being now out of hearing, she turns threateningly to her son with one of those sudden Irish changes of manner which amaze and scandalize less flexible nations, and exclaims.) And what do you mean, you lying young scald, by telling me you were going to fight agen the English? Did you take me for a fool that couldn’t find out, and the papers all full of you shaking hands with the English king at Buckingham Palace?

O’FLAHERTY

. I didn’t shake hands with him: he shook hands with me. Could I turn on the man in his own house, before his own wife, with his money in my pocket and in yours, and throw his civility back in his face?

MRS O’FLAHERTY

. You would take the hand of a tyrant red with the blood of Ireland–

O’FLAHERTY

. Arra hold your nonsense, mother: he’s not half the tyrant you are, God help him. His hand was cleaner than mine that had the blood of his own relations on it, maybe.

MRS O’FLAHERTY

[threateningly]. Is that a way to speak to your mother, you young spalpeen?

O’FLAHERTY

[stoutly]. It is so, if you won’t talk sense to me. It’s a nice thing for a poor boy to be made much of by kings and queens, and shook hands with by the heighth of his country’s nobility in the capital cities of the world, and then to come home and be scolded and insulted by his own mother. I’ll fight for who I like; and I’ll shake hands with what kings I like; and if your own son is not good enough for you, you can go and look for another. Do you mind me now?

MRS O’FLAHERTY

. And was it the Belgians learned you such brazen impudence?

O’FLAHERTY

. The Belgians is good men; and the French ought to be more civil to them, let alone their being half murdered by the Boshes.

MRS O’FLAHERTY

. Good men is it! Good men! to come over here when they were wounded because it was a Catholic country, and then to go to the Protestant Church because it didn’t cost them anything, and some of them to never go near a church at all. That’s what you call good men!

O’FLAHERTY

. Oh, you’re the mighty fine politician, aren’t you? Much you know about Belgians or foreign parts or the world you’re living in, God help you!

MRS O’FLAHERTY

. Why wouldn’t I know better than you? Amment I your mother?

O’FLAHERTY

. And if you are itself, how can you know what you never seen as well as me that was dug into the continent of Europe for six months, and was buried in the earth of it three times with the shells bursting on the top of me? I tell you I know what I’m about. I have my own reasons for taking part in this great conflict. I’d be ashamed to stay at home and not fight when everybody else is fighting.