Dublin's gilded youth and where there was a certain plain
honesty in the bill of fare. His evenings were spent either before his
landlady's piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking
for Mozart's music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these
were the only dissipations of his life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his
spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives
at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He
performed these two social duties for old dignity's sake but conceded
nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He
allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob
his hank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out
evenly--an adventureless tale.

One evening he found himself sitting beside two ladies in the Rotunda.
The house, thinly peopled and silent, gave distressing prophecy of
failure. The lady who sat next him looked round at the deserted house
once or twice and then said:

"What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! It's so hard on people
to have to sing to empty benches."

He took the remark as an invitation to talk. He was surprised that
she seemed so little awkward. While they talked he tried to fix her
permanently in his memory. When he learned that the young girl beside
her was her daughter he judged her to be a year or so younger than
himself. Her face, which must have been handsome, had remained
intelligent. It was an oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes
were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note
but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the
iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The
pupil reasserted itself quickly, this half-disclosed nature fell again
under the reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom
of a certain fullness, struck the note of defiance more definitely.

He met her again a few weeks afterwards at a concert in Earlsfort
Terrace and seized the moments when her daughter's attention was
diverted to become intimate. She alluded once or twice to her husband
but her tone was not such as to make the allusion a warning. Her name
was Mrs. Sinico. Her husband's great-great-grandfather had come from
Leghorn. Her husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying between
Dublin and Holland; and they had one