en, your holy faith, surely you will
not be forsaking that for this boy!'"

"And what did she say to that, Pegeen?" the neighbor asked.

"'Sure it's promised to turn he has,' she answered. 'And do everything
is right by me, so much I love him!'"

"The treacherous Ulster hound!" The neighbor inveighed.

"Treacherous by race and treacherous by nature. Sure, can't you see it,
the way he treats me? Sorrow word he has for me, that bore the wife of
his bosom, barring, 'Alan Donn Campbell will see you and fix up
everything.' And haven't I met Alan Campbell once before, and it's the
cold eye he has and the hard heart. And this is all the return I get for
bearing the white darling would be fit mate for a king. There was a
publican of Dundalk had an eye on her, a big red-faced, hearty man. And
she might have married him but this lad came and spoiled everything. And
if she'd married him, I'd have been sitting in the parlor of the public
house, in a seemly black dress and a brooch in the bosom of it, taking
my pinch of snuff and my strong cup of tea with a drop of Hollands in it
would warm the cockles of your heart, and listening to the conversation
of the fine customers and them loosening up with the drink. And the ould
grannies would have courtesied to me and hate in their hearts. But now a
leaf on the wind am I, a broken twig on the stream. And the black men of
Ulster have me for a plaything, the men that have a hatred for me and my
kind, so that it's a knife they'd put in you, or poison in your tea--"

"Let you be coming in now, Pegeen. Let you be coming in now. And take a
cup of tea would put heart in you, or something strong, maybe. And then
we'll be saying a prayer for her who's gone--"

"Dead she is, the poor heart, dead she is, and better off nor I am--"

Her high querulousness died away as she went into the house, and again
was the silence of the riding moon. All her grief, all her lies, all
her bitterness had not stirred a leaf upon the bough. Not a robin in
the hedge was disturbed by her calamity, not a rabbit in the field, not
a weasel in the lane....

Section 9

He thought to himself: had they rushed him into this marriage? And he
answered himself truthfully, they had not. He could have said no, and
stood by his no, young as he was, against every old woman and every
young woman in the world. No, fast as they had worked, they hadn't
worked faster than his thought had.

And did he marry because he was in lo