The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before—years before—in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The past—despite its poverty and starvation—had been as dear as life. She had suffered all those pangs of dissolution that assail the home-loving Irish when they have to leave what association has made dear to them; for, with the Irish, familiarity does not breed contempt but affection.
She suffered these same miseries now. She saw her home through tears of regret, though unhappiness had driven her from it. And her lips were set in a determination never to return to Cregan, though her chin trembled with pity of herself in the determination.
Some distance behind her came a smaller woman, as shrunken, as withered, and as yellow as an old leaf. Even her shoes seemed to have dried and shriveled, curling up at the toes. And she fluttered along in the light morning breeze, holding back against it, on her heels, with an odd effect of being carried forward faster than she wished to go.
She was Mrs. Byrne, from the floor below Mrs. Cregan's flat, and she had been starting out on a secret errand of her own when she heard the quarrel overhead and stopped to hear the end of it. There was something guilty in her manner, and she was evidently struggling between her desire to reach the next street unseen by Mrs. Cregan and her desire to know what had happened in the Cregan flat. Her curiosity proved the stronger.
She let the wind blow her alongside her friend's portly despair. She said, in the hoarse whisper that was all she had left of her voice: "Is it yerself, Missus Cregan? Yuh're off to choorch early this mornin'."
Mrs. Cregan looked around, blinking to clear her eyes. "Choorch?" she said, on the plaintiveness of a high note that broke in her throat.
"Yuh're cryin', woman!". Her look of craftiness had changed at once to one of
startled distress. "Come back out o' this with yuh." She caught Mrs. Cregan's arm. "It's no thing to be doin' on the street! Come back, now. Where're yuh goin'?"
Mrs. Cregan marched stolidly ahead and carried her neighbor with her. "I've quit 'm."
"Quit who?"