manner and sensibility of apprehension, her thin hands and
slender figure, her travel accent, with the caressing plaintive
Irish melody of her speech, give her a charm which is all the
more effective because, being untravelled, she is unconscious of
it, and never dreams of deliberately dramatizing and exploiting
it, as the Irishwoman in England does. For Tom Broadbent
therefore, an attractive woman, whom he would even call ethereal.
To Larry Doyle, an everyday woman fit only for the eighteenth
century, helpless, useless, almost sexless, an invalid without
the excuse of disease, an incarnation of everything in Ireland
that drove him out of it. These judgments have little value and
no finality; but they are the judgments on which her fate hangs
just at present. Keegan touches his hat to her: he does not take
it off.

NORA. Mr Keegan: I want to speak to you a minute if you don't
mind.

KEEGAN [dropping the broad Irish vernacular of his speech to
Patsy]. An hour if you like, Miss Reilly: you're always welcome.
Shall we sit down?

NORA. Thank you. [They sit on the heather. She is shy and
anxious; but she comes to the point promptly because she can
think of nothing else]. They say you did a gradle o travelling at
one time.

KEEGAN. Well you see I'm not a Mnooth man [he means that he was
not a student at Maynooth College]. When I was young I admired
the older generation of priests that had been educated in