Cracked Mary: Let you throw open the door, Davideen. It is not ourselves are in dread that the white man in the sky will be calling names after us and ridiculing us. Ha! ha! I might be as foolish as yourselves and as fearful, but for the Almighty that left a little cleft in my skull, that would let in His candle through the night time.
Hyacinth Halvey: Hurry on now, tell us is there any one in this place is wild and astray like yourself.
(He opens the door. The light falls on him.)
Cracked Mary: (Putting her hand on him.) There was great shouting in the big round house, and you coming into it last night.
Hyacinth Halvey: What are you saying? I never went frolicking in the night time since the day I came into Cloon.
Cracked Mary: We were talking of it a while ago. I knew you by the smile and by the laugh of you. A queen having a yellow dress, and the hair on her smooth like marble. All the dead of the village were in it, and of the living myself and yourself.
Hyacinth Halvey: I thought it was of Carrow she was talking; it is of the other world she is raving, and of the shadow-shapes of the forth.
Cracked Mary: You have the door open—the speckled horses are on the road!—make a leap on the horse as it goes by, the horse that is without a rider. Can't you hear them puffing and roaring? Their breath is like a fog upon the air.
Hyacinth Halvey: What you hear is but the train puffing afar off.
Cracked Mary: Make a snap at the bridle as it passes by the bush in the western gap. Run out now, run, where you have the bare ridge of the world before you, and no one to take orders from but yourself, maybe, and God.