MICHAEL -- [loudly with horror.] -- You'd be making him a son to me, and he
wet and crusted with his father's blood?
PEGEEN. Aye. Wouldn't it be a bitter thing for a girl to go marrying the
like of Shaneen, and he a middling kind of a scarecrow, with no savagery or
fine words in him at all?
MICHAEL -- [gasping and sinking on a chair.] -- Oh, aren't you a heathen
daughter to go shaking the fat of my heart, and I swamped and drownded with
the weight of drink? Would you have them turning on me the way that I'd be
roaring to the dawn of day with the wind upon my heart? Have you not a word
to aid me, Shaneen? Are you not jealous at all?
SHANEEN -- [In great misery.] -- I'd be afeard to be jealous of a man did slay
his da.
PEGEEN. Well, it'd be a poor thing to go marrying your like. I'm seeing
there's a world of peril for an orphan girl, and isn't it a great blessing I
didn't wed you, before himself came walking from the west or south?
SHAWN. It's a queer story you'd go picking a dirty tramp up from the highways
of the world.
PEGEEN -- [playfully.] And you think you're a likely beau to go straying
along with, the shiny Sundays of the opening year, when it's sooner on a
bullock's liver you'd put a poor girl thinking than on the lily or the rose?
SHAWN. And have you no mind of my weight of passion, and the holy
dispensation, and the drift of heifers I am giving, and the golden ring?
PEGEEN. I'm thinking you're too fine for the like of me, Shawn Keogh of
Killakeen, and let you go off till you'd find a radiant lady with droves of
bullocks on the plains of Meath, and herself bedizened in the diamond
jewelleries of Pharaoh's ma.
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