He noticed that she was in good heart, and, although it was customary with him to be pleased to see his mother in a mood of gladness, he could not enter into laughter and gossip with her now.
But she could not be silent. This small expedition into the outer world of passing events was now causing her mind to leap, with surprising agility, from topic to topic.... Yet what was striking John more than her talk, and with a more arresting realization, was, that although the hour of his Mass-going was imminent, she was not reminding him or urging him to remembrance of the good custom.... At last he was driven by some scruple to remind her of the time, and it was her answer that finally amazed him:
"Ah, sure you mightn't go to-day, John. You're tired and all to that, I know, and I want to tell you.... He! he! he! Now wasn't it the funniest thing to see the schoolmistress of Ballinamult and the schoolmistress of Tullahanogue and they up upon the one stage with Harry Holton's dramatics making sport for a lot of grinning idiots? Like a couple of circus girls they were, the brazen things! Indeed Miss Kerr is the bold-looking hussy, with not a bit of shame in her at all. But sure we may say she fell among her equals, for there wasn't much class connected with it anyhow."
"I think Ulick Shannon was knocking about the stage."
The words strayed, without much sense of meaning or direction, out of the current of his musing, but they produced a swift and certain effect upon Mrs. Brennan. Her eyes seemed to cloud suddenly behind her glasses.
"Aye ... I wonder who was the girl he went off with through the wood as we came out. Never fear it was the new schoolmistress."
She said this with a curious, dead quietness in her tones, and when she had spoken she seemed instantly sorry that the words had slipped from her lips.... It seemed a queer thing to say to her son and he going on to be a priest.
John thought it very strange that she too should have observed this incident, which he had imagined must have been hidden from all eyes save his own. He now wondered how many more must have seen it as he tried to recall the sensations with which it had filled him.... But beyond this remarkable endeavor of his mind his mother was again speaking:
"If you went now, you'd be in time for half-past eight Mass."
He did not fail to notice the immediate change which had taken place in her, and wondered momentarily what could have been its sudden cause. He was beginning to notice of late that she had grown more and more subject to such unaccountable fits.