“They are the great minds of the world. They are the men who proved that there was no heaven and no God.”
“If there is, why do ye suffer like this?”
“Ha! ha!” laughed the man. “How funny! how very funny! Ye are a child, and God would feel honoured if ye allowed Him to lace yer shoes. If ye kept very good and pure He might let ye to heaven when ye died--but would He give ye a pair of shoes in mid-winter?... There’s no God.... Kiss me again. By heaven! If ye weren’t so good lookin’ and so temptin’ I’d be generous. I’d go down on my knees and salute ye as a representative of sufferin’ womankind, and then go away feelin’ honoured if ye only allowed me to kiss your hand. But ye are so winsome! I should like ye to be always pure, but why do men like purity in a woman? They like it so that they can take it away, so that they can kill that which they love. But what am I talkin’ about anyway? I’m drunk; not so much--just three sheets in the wind or so. I can see things clearly. I’m a learned man and I know things, bein’ a great traveller, and a worker on half the docks in the world, and a sailor too. A.B. before the mast I am. I’ve seen things in my time, many things, most of them unjust, very unjust. It’s seven years since I left home, think of that! Yer father came from Ireland, ye say. What part of the country did he come from?”
“I don’t know,” said Norah in a low voice. “I never asked him. What part of Ireland did ye come from?”
“I said that it is an unjust world, a danged unjust world,” said the man, pressing her tightly and kissing her. “And in Ireland ye see more injustice than can be seen anywhere in half the world. I’ve seen women and girls in Ireland working for a penny a day. They were knittin’ socks and they had to travel miles for the yarn; aye, and to cross an arm of the sea that took them to their breasts. In the height of winter, too, with the snow fallin’ and the sleet. Ah! if yerself had suffered such hardships ye wouldn’t live to tell the tale. And children too had to go out into the cold black water! My sister, a very little girl--just about that size”--the sailor held out his hand about two feet from the ground--“used to work fourteen hours a day when she was but twelve, and her pay was sevenpence ha’penny a week! The hanged little thing! and she wasn’t that size.... But I’ve made some money--salvage, ye know--and I’m goin’ to make my sister a lady when I go back to Donegal. She was such a nice wee girl. Wouldn’t it be fine if girls always kept young! I think of my sister now as I left her, not grown up at all.... Ye too are a nice lass, so different from those I’ve seen in the far corners of the world.”