To understand Kitty at this moment one must be able to understand the
Irish; and nobody does or can or will. Consider her twenty-four
years, her corpuscular inheritance, the love of drama and the love of
adventure. Imagine possessing sound ideas of life and the ability
to apply them, and spiritually always galloping off on some broad
highway--more often than not furnished by some engaging scoundrel of
a novelist--and you will be able to construct a half tone of Kitty
Conover.

That civilization might be actually on its deathbed, that positively
half of the world was starving and dying and going mad through the
reaction of the German blight touched her in a detached way. She felt
sorry, dreadfully sorry, for the poor things; but as she could not help
them she dismissed them from her thoughts every morning after she had
read the paper, the way most of us do here in these United States. You
cannot grapple with the misery of an unknown person several thousand
miles away.

That which had taken place during the past twenty-four hours was to her
a lark, a blindman's buff for grown-ups. It was not in her to tremble,
to shudder, to hesitate, to weigh this and to balance that. Irish
curiosity. Perhaps in the original that immortal line read: "The
Irish rush in where angels fear to tread," and some proofreader had a
particular grudge against the race.