It was my own son hit me, and he the divil a robber, or anything else,
but a dirty, stuttering lout.
WIDOW -- [letting go his skull and wiping her hands in her apron.] -- You'd
best be wary of a mortified scalp, I think they call it, lepping around with
that wound in the splendour of the sun. It was a bad blow surely, and you
should have vexed him fearful to make him strike that gash in his da.
MAHON. Is it me?
WIDOW QUIN -- [amusing herself.] -- Aye. And isn't it a great shame when the
old and hardened do torment the young?
MAHON -- [raging.] Torment him is it? And I after holding out with the
patience of a martyred saint till there's nothing but destruction on, and I'm
driven out in my old age with none to aid me.
WIDOW QUIN -- [greatly amused.] -- It's a sacred wonder the way that
wickedness will spoil a man.
MAHON. My wickedness, is it? Amn't I after saying it is himself has me
destroyed, and he a liar on walls, a talker of folly, a man you'd see
stretched the half of the day in the brown ferns with his belly to the sun.
WIDOW QUIN. Not working at all?
MAHON. The divil a work, or if he did itself, you'd see him raising up a
haystack like the stalk of a rush, or driving our last cow till he broke her
leg at the hip, and when he wasn't at that he'd be fooling over little birds
he had -- finches and felts -- or making mugs at his own self in the bit of
glass we had hung on the wall.
WIDOW QUIN -- [looking at Christy.] -- What way was he so foolish? It was
running wild after the girls may be?
MAHON -- [with a shout of derision.
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