"I have the life I like," she answered, "and whether it's good or bad doesn't matter."
"Tell me the reason you never let himself make love to you when he wants to make it?"
"He is a domineering man," said she, "and I am a proud woman, and we would never give in to each other. When one of us would want to do a thing the other one wouldn't do it, and there would be no living between us. If I said black he would say white, and if he said yes I would say no, and that's how we are."
"He has a great love for you."
"He has a great hate for me. He loves me the way a dog loves bones, and in a little while he'd kill me in a lonely place with his hands to see what I would look like and I dying."
She turned her face to Mac Cann:
"That's the kind of man you are to me, Padraig, although you're different to other people."
"I am not that sort of man, but it's yourself is like that. I tell you that if I took a woman with me I'd be staunch to her the way I was with the mother of the girl there, and if you were to come with me you wouldn't have any complaint from now on."
"I know every thing I'm talking about," she replied sternly, "and I won't go with you, but I'll go with the young man here beside me."
With the words she put her hand on Art's arm and kept it there.