He stared at me a moment, his eyes suddenly charged with dreams. Then,
characteristically, he snorted. He flung his hand out with a gesture that
should push the present further from him.

"I've always liked the Eastern theory--old theory anyhow if not
Eastern--that intense yearnings end by creating a place where they are
fulfilled--"

"Subjectively--"

"Of course; objectively means incompletely. I mean a Heaven built up by
desire and intense longing all your life. Your own thought makes it.
Living idea, that!"

"Another dream, Terence O'Malley," I laughed, "but beautiful and
seductive."

To argue bored him. He loved to state his matter, fill it with detail,
blow the heated breath of life into it, and then leave it. Argument
belittled without clarifying; criticism destroyed, sealing up the sources
of life. Any fool could argue; the small, denying minds were always
critics.

"A dream, but a damned foine one, let me tell you," he exclaimed,
recovering his brogue in his enthusiasm. He glared at me a second, then
burst out laughing. "Tis better to have dhreamed and waked," he added,
"than never to have dhreamed at all."

And then he poured out O'Shaughnessy's passionate ode to the Dreamers of
the world: