PEGEEN. If you weren’t destroyed travelling, you’d have as much talk and streeleen, I’m thinking, as Owen Roe O’Sullivan or the poets of the Dingle Bay, and I’ve heard all times it’s the poets are your like, fine fiery fellows with great rages when their temper’s roused.
CHRISTY. _drawing a little nearer to her._—You’ve a power of rings, God bless you, and would there be any offence if I was asking are you single now?
PEGEEN. What would I want wedding so young?
PEGEEN. _she puts sack on settle and beats it up._—I never killed my father. I’d be afeard to do that, except I was the like of yourself with blind rages tearing me within, for I’m thinking you should have had great tussling when the end was come.
CHRISTY. _expanding with delight at the first confidential talk he has ever had with a woman._—We had not then. It was a hard woman was come over the hill, and if he was always a crusty kind when he’d a hard woman setting him on, not the divil himself or his four fathers could put up with him at all.
PEGEEN. _with curiosity._—And isn’t it a great wonder that one wasn’t fearing you?
CHRISTY. _very confidentially._—Up to the day I killed my father, there wasn’t a person in Ireland knew the kind I was, and I there drinking, waking, eating, sleeping, a quiet, simple poor fellow with no man giving me heed.
PEGEEN. _getting a quilt out of the cupboard and putting it on the sack._—It was the girls were giving you heed maybe, and I’m thinking it’s most conceit you’d have to be gaming with their like.
CHRISTY. _shaking his head, with simplicity._—Not the girls itself, and I won’t tell you a lie. There wasn’t anyone heeding me in that place saving only the dumb beasts of the field. [_He sits down at fire._]
PEGEEN. _with disappointment._—And I thinking you should have been living the like of a king of Norway or the Eastern world. [_She comes and sits beside him after placing bread and mug of milk on the table._]
CHRISTY. _laughing piteously._—The like of a king, is it? And I after toiling, moiling, digging, dodging from the dawn till dusk with never a sight of joy or sport saving only when I’d be abroad in the dark night poaching rabbits on hills, for I was a divil to poach, God forgive me, (_very naïvely_) and I near got six months for going with a dung fork and stabbing a fish.