Dubliners: The Dead

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:
“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”

The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead, where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes.

Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face.

The two aunts laughed heartily, too, for Gabriel’s solicitude was a standing joke with them.

The smile soon faded from Aunt Julia’s face and her mirthless eyes were directed towards her nephew’s face.

A tall wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin, who was passing out with his partner, said:
“And may we have some refreshment, too, Miss Morkan?”

The top of the closed square piano served also as a sideboard for viands and sweets.

His wizened face broke into a broader smile, and the three young ladies laughed in musical echo to his pleasantry, swaying their bodies to and fro, with nervous jerks of their shoulders.

His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose.

He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips.

The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page.

Thanks to her, Constantine was now senior curate in Balbrigan and, thanks to her, Gabriel himself had taken his degree in the Royal University.

A shadow passed over his face as he remembered her sullen opposition to his marriage.

Some slighting phrases she had used still rankled in his memory; she had once spoken of Gretta as being country cute and that was not true of Gretta at all.

The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque.

While she was threading her way back across the room Mrs. Malins, without adverting to the interruption, went on to tell Gabriel what beautiful places there were in Scotland and beautiful scenery.

Freddy Malins, who had listened with his head perched sideways to hear her better, was still applauding when everyone else had ceased and talking animatedly to his mother who nodded her head gravely and slowly in acquiescence.

She turned as if to appeal to the good sense of the others against a refractory child while Aunt Julia gazed in front of her, a vague smile of reminiscence playing on her face.

Everyone protested loudly so that he compromised by taking a long draught of stout for he had found the carving hot work.

As the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table during which Mrs. Malins could be heard saying to her neighbour in an indistinct undertone: “They are very good men, the monks, very pious men.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, a new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles."

Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections...

The task would be an invidious one and one beyond my poor powers.

...our chief hostess herself, whose good heart, whose too good heart, has become a byword with all who know her, or her sister, who seems to be gifted with perennial youth and whose singing must have been a surprise and a revelation to us all tonight, or, last but not least, when I consider our youngest hostess, talented, cheerful,...

The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief:
O, the rain falls on my heavy locks And the dew wets my skin, My babe lies cold .

The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief:
O, the rain falls on my heavy locks And the dew wets my skin, My babe lies cold .

Mr. D’Arcy stood swathing his neck carefully and frowning.

Gabriel, trembling with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers.

Perhaps she had felt the impetuous desire that was in him, and then the yielding mood had come upon her.

Now that she had fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident.

He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.

He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.

It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.