CHAPTER VIII
The first and most pressing necessity of a woman's life is—what? Love? No, a home. A home implies love and everything in life worth having.
A girl without a home and without relations is the loneliest thing on earth, simply because she is a woman, and nothing has such a capacity for loneliness as a woman.
Give her anything in the way of a tie, and she will crystallise on to it and take it to heart, just as the sugar in a solution of barley-sugar takes the string.
So it came about that Violet Grimshaw found herself, in less than three weeks after her arrival at Drumgool, not only acclimatised to her new surroundings, but literally one of the family. She had caught on to them, and they had caught on to her. French, with that charming easiness which one finds rarely nowadays, except in that fast vanishing individual, the real old Irish gentleman, had from the first treated her as though he had known her for years. Guessing, with the sure intuition of the irresponsible, the level-headedness and worth behind her prettiness, he now talked to her about his most intimate affairs, both financial and family.
In him and in the other denizens of Drumgool was brought home to her the power of the Celtic nature to imagine things and take them for granted.
"Now, where's me colander?" Mrs. Driscoll would say (as, for instance, in a dialogue which reached the girl one afternoon with a whiff of kitchen-scented air through a swing-door left open). "Where's me colander? It's that black baste of a Doolan. I b'lave he's taken it to feed the chickens. I'll tie a dish-cloth to his tail if he comes into me kitchen takin' me colanders! Doolan! Foolan! Come here wid ye, and bring me me colander. I'll tell the masther on you for takin' me things. You haven't got it? May Heaven forgive you, but I saw you with the two eyes in me head, and it in your hand! It's forenint me nose? Which nose? Oh, glory be to Heaven! so it is. Now, out of me kitchen wid you, and don't be littherin' me floor with your dirty boots!"
The connection of Doolan with the missing colander was based on a pure assumption.
Just so French had adorned the portrait of Miss Grimshaw, which he had painted in his own mind, with spectacles. And he would have sworn to those spectacles in a court of law.
Just so, by extension, he saw Garryowen passing the winning-post despite all the obstacles in his path. But it was the case of Effie that brought home to Miss Grimshaw this trait with full force.