The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:
`The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.'
Gabriel coloured, as if he felt he had made a mistake, and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.
Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a penny-boy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.
He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.
`I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,' he said.
`I was great with him at that time,' she said.
`You know that poor fellow Malins?' he said quickly.
`Yes. What about him?'
`Well, poor fellow, be's a decent sort of chap, after all,' continued Gabriel in a false voice. `He gave me back that sovereign I lent him, and I didn't expect it, really. It's a pity he wouldn't keep away from that Browne, because he's not a bad fellow, really.'
He was trembling now with annoyance. Why did she seem so abstracted? He did not know how he could begin. Was she annoyed, too, about something? If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he must see some ardour in her eyes first. He longed to be master of her strange mood.
`When did you lend him the pound?' she asked, after a pause.
Gabriel strove to restrain himself from breaking out into brutal language about the sottish Malins and his pound. He longed to cry to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her. But he said:
`O, at Christmas, when he opened that little Christmas-card shop, in Henry Street.'
He was in such a fever of rage and desire that he did not hear her come from the window.
`But yet,' continued Gabriel, his voice falling into a softer inflection, `there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here tonight. Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours.
`Therefore, I will not linger on the past. I will not let any gloomy moralizing intrude upon us here tonight. Here we are gathered together for a brief moment from the bustle and rush of our everyday routine.
`The late lamented Patrick Morkan, our grandfather, that is,' explained Gabriel, `commonly known in his later years as the old gentleman, was a glue-boiler.'
That was all very well; but now comes the tragic part about Johnny
The never-to-be-forgotten Johnny,' said Mary Jane, laughing.
He was dressed in a long green overcoat with mock astrakhan cuffs and collar and wore on his head an oval fur cap.
Someone is fooling at the piano anyhow,
Close the door, somebody. Mrs Malins will get her death of cold