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through one’s job.”
    The real trouble came in Philadelphia, where the cast was arrested. Lady Gregory called John Quinn and told him that she “would sooner go to her death than give in”, adding in a letter to her son that she “should like to avoid arrest because of the publicity, one would feel like a suffragette ”. Quinn had been watching the coverage of The Playboy very carefully. He wrote to her: “The policemen that ought to be put in the theater ought to be Irish policemen ; then the town would have the edifying spectacle of Irish policemen ejecting Irish rowdies from an Irish play. I have not seen anything like the bitterness or unfairness of these attacks both by Irish ignoramuses and abnormal churchmen since the last days of Parnell.”
    Once the players had been arrested, Quinn took over the legal case and caused enormous excitement by arriving in the courtroom, fresh from New York, just in time to cross-examine a witness and make “a very fine speech”. The actors, she wrote, “adore John Quinn, and his name will pass into folk-lore like those stories of O’Connell suddenly appearing at trials. He spoke splendidly, with fire and full knowledge.” In her book, Lady Gregory watered down her great hatred for the other side, the Irish- Americans without toothbrushes, which she expressed in her letters to Robert: “The witnesses brought against us were the most villainous-looking creatures. I wanted to get a snap-shooter  but could not get through the crowds. Their faces would have been enough to exonerate us.” She also left out what she told Robert on Christmas Day 1911: “Quinn has given me a very small and simple gold watch bracelet, I like it, though it doesn’t look the 180 dollars I saw on the ticket when I tried it on! … Quinn won’t go bankrupt at present over it, as yesterday he was kept all day on unexpected business and came in at 10.30 to explain it was a reconstruction of a railway company he had been suddenly asked to undertake and his fee will be 10,000 pounds in shares.”
    When the tour was over, Lady Gregory stayed with John Quinn for almost a week. The letters she wrote to him on her return to Ireland in March 1912, when she celebrated her sixtieth birthday, and in April, suggest the intensity of their relationship during that short time. “My dear John,” she wrote, “I think you are never out of my mind – though sometimes all seems a dream, a wonderful dream … How good you were to me! How happy I was with you. How much I love you!”; and “My John, my dear John, my own John, not other people’s John, I love you, I care for you, I know you, I want you, I believe in you, I see you always”; and “Oh my darling, am I now lonely after you? Do I not awake looking for you … Why do I love you so much? … It is some call that came in a moment – something impetuous and masterful about you that satisfies me.”
    Quinn’s letters to her, which he kept copies of, are in the New York Public Library alongside her letters to him, including the letters quoted above. He was a rambling, deeply opinionated, gossipy correspondent. The fact that he dictated many of the letters gave him ample opportunity to be long-winded, but it also meant that he was careful . “I often think of you over there with the two grandchildren,” he wrote in November 1913, “and your work and your success and the full rich life you lead.” And three years later: “What a wonderful woman you are, with the energy of a Roosevelt and more balance! If you had been in Redmond’s place there would have been home rule long ago.” And two years after that: “I have always said that you were the most wonderful woman I have ever met.”
    While these admiring letters from Quinn lack the intimate , ardent tone of Lady Gregory’s letters to him from 1912 and tell us