"Sure ye don't have to pass the buck just because y' ask the saints to pray for ye, do ye? Pray for us, Brogan. Ye've got nothing else to do."
It was another opening.
"I wish I had, Denis. I've found that I don't know how to loaf. If you hear of anything—"
He nodded, with beatified aspiration in his leathery old face.
"Aw, then, if it's that way you feel, the Holy Mother 'll find ye something, Protestant though y' are, just as sure as she showed ould Biddy Murphy, and her a Protestant too, that me mother knew in Ireland where there was two-and-sixpence lyin' in the mud, and she with the rent comin' due the next mornin': This is the new Brogan," he continued, with a wave of his hand toward the dark, wiry man, who responded with a grin. "He can't talk our talk hardly not at all, not no more than the monkey I used to tell you about. A Pole he calls hisself; but I nivver heard of no such nation as that till I come to this country. We nivver had them in Ireland at all—at all. There was Ulster men, and Munster men, and men from the County Monaghan; but I nivver heard tell of no Poles. Do you think they's have sowls like us? Or would they be like them Chinees and Japansey men?"
"For Gawd's sake, here's the Floater," Bridget warned, softly, and every man got back to his work.
Back at their work they had no time for further conversation; and in some way, impossible for me to tell you in words, I felt myself eliminated from their fellowship. They would always be friendly; but the knowledge that I was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, which had once been the outcome of a common need, was no longer theirs nor mine. I could look in at them in this non-committal way as often as I chose; but I should never get any farther.
Something of the sort was manifest when I next met Lydia Blair. Our standing toward each other was different. Little as she had understood me before, she understood me less in this new rôle than in any other.
"You sure are the queerest guy I ever met," she said, at one time in the course of the evening. "I sometimes wonder if you're all there."
But that was after I had been foolish enough to try to make her see my point of view toward life, and failed. Before that she had been sympathetic.