26
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Isn't he the Protestant devil!" Mrs. O'Flaherty said bitterly.
"Mother, I dreamed it. Last night, I dreamed it. Father came to
me, and he told me that the skunk was giving the gate to my sister,
Peg. Mother, just when you came down here, right after I just nursed
my little precious Arty and put him to sleep for a nap, I knew it.
I said to myself that my lovely mother was coming down to see me
and tell me just what Father did last night when I was in bed."
"You saw Peg?" Mrs. O'Flaherty asked jealously.
"Yes, he came to me in a vision about midnight," Lizz said.
"The devil of a nerve he has. You see him more than I do," Mrs.
O'Flaherty said curtly.
"Mother, my father loved you. He always speaks of you when
he comes to me. He tells me to take care of you," Lizz said, while from
the yard outside, her young ones could be heard yelling and laughing
in play.
"Indeed, he should love me. He better. Even if he is in Heaven,
ah, he's afraid of me. Wherever he is in the next world, he knows
who can make him toe the mark," Mrs: O'Flaherty said in pride.
"And so that dirty Protestant, Lorry Robinson, tied a can to
my sister, Peg. Well, it serves her right. Sinning the way she did.
Why she was a disgrace, Mother, a disgrace," Lizz said.
"I should have seen him in the street like Peg did. I just should!
That's all I ask," Mrs. O'Flaherty said, speaking slowly in high
pitched sing song, and shaking a bony fist as she spoke.
.
"No, Mother, you should never fight in the street. It isn't lady
like," Lizz said, smirking, adjusting the soiled rag which she had
tied under her chin because of her neuralgia.
"Lady like be damned! Lady like to spit in the eyes of a street
-walker, and suck the blood out of a Protestant limb of the devil!"
"Mother, oh no, oh no! You should never go beneath your
dignity and fight in the street," Lizz said.
"I'll fight that one!" Mrs. O'Flaherty said, flinging her right arm
outward and upward demonstratively. "Ah, if your Jim should do
that! If your Jim ran after a chippy, I'd split his head open and let
the dogs drink his blood," Mrs. O'Flaherty said.
"Mother, my Jim is a good hard working man. You' can't com-
pare him with a rich trifler like Lorry Robinson. Mother, that
Protestant is a trifler. He's a trifler, a dirty stinking trifler! That's
all he is," Lizz said self-righteously.
"If I ever lay the sight of day on him with these eyes of mine!"
Mrs. O'Flaherty bitterly monotoned, almost singing her words.
"Mother, if you pass him on the street, don't speak to him. Don't
give him the satisfaction. Here's what you do," Lizz said. She arose,
and walked across the kitchen in a clumsily mincing manner, swinging
