“I don’t know who they are,” he said, “but I’d like to play with them—that old lady who’s moving something under her shawl and speakin’ to herself, with the nice young lady, with the man with the hump and the fiddle; with every one of them.”
Gourock Ellen was speaking to Micky’s Jim.
“Have ye ever slept under a bridge with the wind chillin’ ye to the bone?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“That’s where I slept last night,” said Ellen fiercely. “Isn’t that a pretty dress that that woman has, Jim?”
“And Annie?” Jim asked, putting a match to the eternal pipe.
“She slept along wi’ me,” Ellen replied. “Blood is warm even when it runs thin.”
“If ye had the price of that lady’s dress, ye’d not have to sleep out for a week of Sundays,” said Jim, pointing to the woman with the lorgnette. “See her brats too! Look how they’re glowerin’ at Norah Ryan!”
“The children are very pretty,” said the woman, and a slight touch of regret softened her harsh voice. Perhaps for the moment she longed for the children which might have been hers if all had gone well. “Norah Ryan is a very soncy wench, isn’t she, Jim?” she went on. “What is the bald man readin’?”
“Christian Guide,” said Jim, who spent a whole year at school and who could read a little.