'Tch! tch!'
'And do you suppose the children are a comfort to her? Sorra bit. Just a look at them and she wants to be alone. "Take them away, let you," says she, shutting her eyes. "The others is realer."'
'And you think she's in her right mind all the same?'
'I do. ’Tis just something she likes to be thinking over—something she's fair dotty about. Why, it's the same when Father Flint is here. Polite and riverintial at the first, then impatient, and, if the poor man doesn't be taking the hint, she just closes up shop and off again into her whimsies. You'd swear she was in fear of missing something?'
The visitor, being a young wife, had an explanation to hazard. 'If she was a widow woman, now, or married—perhaps she had a liking for somebody once. Perhaps she might be trying to imagine them young days over again. Do you think could it be that?'
Anna shook her head. 'My mother used to say she was a born old maid. All she wanted was work and saving her bit of money, and to church every minute she could be sparing.'
'Still, you can't be telling. ’Tis often that kind weeps sorest when 'tis too late. My own old aunt used to cry, "If I could be twenty-five again, wouldn't I do different!"'
'Maybe, maybe, though I doubt could it be so.'
Nor was it so. The old woman, lying back so quietly among her pillows, with closed eyes, yet with that look of singular intentness and concentration, was seeking no lover of her youth; though, indeed, she had had one once, and from time to time he did enter her revery, try as she would to prevent him. At that point, she always made the singular comment, 'Gone past! I must be getting back to the beginning,' and, pressing back into her earliest consciousness, she would remount the flooding current of the years. Each time, she hoped to get further,—though remoter shapes were illusive, and, if approached too closely, vanished,—for, once embarked on her river of memories, the descent was relentlessly swift. How tantalizing that swiftness! However she yearned to linger, she was rushed along till, all too soon, she sailed into the common light of day. At that point, she always put about, and laboriously recommenced the ascent.
To-day, something her niece had said about Donnybrook Fair—for Anna, too, was a child of the old sod—seemed to swell out with a fair wind the sails of her visionary bark. She closed her mind to all familiar shapes and strained back—way, way back, concentrating all her powers in an effort of will. For a bit she seemed to hover in populous space. This did not disturb her; she had experienced the same thing before. It simply meant that she had mounted pretty well up to the fountain-head. The figures, when they did come, would be the ones she most desired.