: potcheen goes to the heart, not to
the head. What ought I to do?

LARRY. Nothing. What need you do?

BROADBENT. There is rather a delicate moral question involved.
The point is, was I drunk enough not to be morally responsible
for my proposal? Or was I sober enough to be bound to repeat it
now that I am undoubtedly sober?

LARRY. I should see a little more of her before deciding.

BROADBENT. No, no. That would not be right. That would not be
fair. I am either under a moral obligation or I am not. I wish I
knew how drunk I was.

LARRY. Well, you were evidently in a state of blithering
sentimentality, anyhow.

BROADBENT. That is true, Larry: I admit it. Her voice has a most
extraordinary effect on me. That Irish voice!

LARRY [sympathetically]. Yes, I know. When I first went to London
I very nearly proposed to walk out with a waitress in an Aerated
Bread shop because her Whitechapel accent was so distinguished,
so quaintly touching, so pretty--

BROADBENT [angrily]. Miss Reilly is not a waitress, is she?

LARRY. Oh, come! The waitress was a very nice girl.

BROADBENT. You think every Englishwoman an angel. You really have
coarse tastes in that way, Larry. Miss Reilly is one of the finer
types: a type rare in England, except perhaps in the best of the
aristocracy.

LARRY. Aristocracy be blowed! Do you know what Nora eats?

BROADBENT. Eats! what do you mean?

LARRY. Breakfast: tea and bread-and-butter, with an occasional
rasher, and an egg on special occasions: say on her birthday.
Dinner in the middle of the day, one course and nothing else. In
the evening, tea and bread-and-butter again. You compare her with
your Englishwomen who wolf down from three to five meat meals a
day; and naturally you find her a sylph. The difference is not a
difference of type: it's the difference between the woman who
eats not wisely but too well, and the woman who eats not wisely
but too little.

BROADBENT [furious]. Larry: you--you--you disgust me. You are a
damned fool. [He sits down angrily on the rustic seat, which
sustains the shock with difficulty].

LARRY. Steady! stead-eee! [He laughs and seats himself on the
table].

Cornelius Doyle, Father Dempsey, Barney Doran, and Matthew
Haffigan come from the house. Doran is a stout bodied, short
armed, roundheaded, red-haired man on the verge of middle age, of
sanguine temperament, with an enormous capacity for derisive,
obscene, blasphemous, or merely cruel and sensele