Rosaleen said it would suit her grand; she dressed in great haste and hurried into the kitchen, where Mrs. Cronin gave her some nice bitter black tea which had been sitting on the stove this long while to get the strength out of it. She likewise pilfered a little bacon fat from Miss Amy’s carefully preserved jar, and fried an egg in it.
And in the process muttered of Miss Amy, in uncomplimentary vein.
“Her, with the long nose of her poking into every bit and bite a poor old woman would be eating.... Never a drop of milk does she leave for me, nor meat to taste on the tip of your tongue.... Well, now, then, how do you like all of this, and the fine new home, and all?”
“I do not like it,” said Rosaleen. “I wish....” She choked back a sob. “I wish I was home again.”
“Whist! Ye have no sinse at all!” cried Mrs. Cronin, secretly delighted. “Did ye not sleep in a fine bed last night?”
“The wind did be blowing on me!” she said. “For the window was left open.”
“’Tis one of their notions,” said Mrs. Cronin, scornfully. “They pay for coal to keep up a fire the night long and then lave the windows wide.”
Rosaleen then told her that she wasn’t used to sleeping in a room alone or in the dark.
“There’s a street light shines in our window the night through,” she said, “and there’s the lot of us, my mother and my sister and the baby and myself. ’Tis more sociable like.”
They talked with gusto for hours. They were equals, in spite of the fact that Mrs. Cronin was sixty and Rosaleen eleven. Mrs. Cronin told a deeply interesting story of her sister’s boy who had been sent to a Protectory, for no proper reason at all; a case of flagrant injustice which Rosaleen understood perfectly, one of her own brothers having been threatened. Rosaleen was not downcast now, or tongue tied; she, too, had stories to tell. Modest and gentle she was, as ever, but a citizen of the world, with experience, albeit vicarious.