I am sorry
the terrible experience of this war--the greatest war ever fought
--has taught you no better, O'Flaherty.
O'FLAHERTY [preserving his dignity]. I don't know about it's
being a great war, sir. It's a big war; but that's not the same
thing. Father Quinlan's new church is a big church: you might
take the little old chapel out of the middle of it and not miss
it. But my mother says there was more true religion in the old
chapel. And the war has taught me that maybe she was right.
SIR PEARCE [grunts sulkily]!!
O'FLAHERTY [respectfully but doggedly]. And there's another thing
it's taught me too, sir, that concerns you and me, if I may make
bold to tell it to you.
SIR PEARCE [still sulky]. I hope it's nothing you oughtn't to say
to me, O'Flaherty.
O'FLAHERTY. It's this, sir: that I'm able to sit here now and
talk to you without humbugging you; and that's what not one of
your tenants or your tenants' childer ever did to you before in
all your long life. It's a true respect I'm showing you at last,
sir. Maybe you'd rather have me humbug you and tell you lies as I
used, just as the boys here, God help them, would rather have me
tell them how I fought the Kaiser, that all the world knows I
never saw in my life, than tell them the truth.
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