Three or four men, and perhaps half-a-dozen women were sitting on the benches. Moggy Geogehagan herself, a short black pipe in her mouth, superintended the cooking of some pap for a regimental baby, in a small tin saucepan on the hob. Geogehagan—a stoutish, baldish trooper, with large red ears—Nelly could not but suspect the fundamental reason of the excessive development of these organs—was sitting on a three-legged stool, engaged, by the aid of a lighted candle, in dropping sealing-wax on the end of a new clay pipe.
There was a momentary lull in the deafening Babel. Then:
“Hooroo, Jude!” said Mrs. Geogehagan, with graceful brevity, rising up to the full extent of her six feet odd of stature, setting her vast elbows akimbo, and surveying the scared intruder with the eye that did not squint while the other swiveled round to make sure that her cookery was not burning. “Will any gintleman or lady presint condescind,” she pursued in a tone of raking irony, “to be afther inthrojuicing me to the bit av’ gintility that’s dhropped in to pay us a marning call?”
“With your good leave, ma’am,” put in Josh, with a more submissive tone and less confident air than Nelly would have ever expected of him, “this is my young wife, who—as I’ve explained to you already—has had the good fortune to be entered on the Regiment’s Married Roll, after nigh on two years of delay. And I take the liberty, among comrades, to hope she’s not unwelcome to any here present?—knowing of no reason why she should be!”
He looked about him, and there was an assenting murmur, and the seated men got up to shake hands, and the women, after a moment’s hesitation, did the same. All save one, more tawdrily dressed than her companions, and with a great many light yellow curls, who kept her face turned persistently away.
“Gi’ me your hand, Mrs. Horrotian, ma’am!” said Mrs. Geogehagan, advancing with great ceremony and stateliness. She added, as Nelly complied—in a soaring shriek that made Mrs. Joshua jump and flush nervously:
“Jems!”
“Is it me you’re wantin’, Moggy?” said bland James Geogehagan.
“It is!” said Mrs. Geogehagan severely, “an’ the Divil mend your manners. Rare up on the ould hind legs av’ you, and bid this dacent young wife av’ Horrotian’s welcome to the Rooms.” She added, as the Corporal complied: “For we may bless ourselves there’s men in the Rigiment that has more dacincy than to stand up for-ninst the clargyman or the priest wid a wagtail av’ the gutther! I say ut in the brazen face that’s lookin’ at me now!”