"High blood and poverty. Sure, your father had a crown on his head and no gold to gild it with."
But the lady pulled her hand away angrily.
"Then you know who I am. What's the good of play-acting? I guessed this would be the way of it!"
"I don't know and I don't care," says the old woman with a grin. "I'm telling you what I see, and till this minute I never laid eye on you or yours. Don't you be speaking again, for there's no sense in that; but harken!"
So she told her her father was poor and proud, an Irish lord with a castle in a bog and an old coach with the cloth hanging off it in flitters and the plough-horses to draw it; and that he never gave her a penny since she married, for he had it not to give. And she told her her husband was no better, but running after the cards and dice all day, so that all the world cried folly on her for taking up with him.
"But no matter!" says Mother Corrigan, "for you did a good deed for yourself that day you stood up with him in the church."
"A good deed!" says the lady, very angry. "Don't you be a foolish old woman, and you so near your end. For I got nothing out of it but care and crying and pinching poverty and five children that I don't know how to put the bread in their mouths; and this minute I'm as lonesome as a widow, for my husband is off and away in the country, and here am I in Dublin; and if I know how to get bit or sup for them it's as much as I do know."
But the old woman shook her head till her teeth rattled.
"Let you be easy and take what's coming. I see you sitting in a king's house, and the walls all gilded gold, and the carpets like moss that your foot would sink into, and riches and grandeur, and everyone bowing down to the mother of the beauties."
"Well, if the half of it's true," says the lady, "the first news should come to me is that I'm a widow; for 'tis impossible it should happen as you say with a husband that hasn't one penny-piece to rattle on a tombstone."