"Look here, Mary," began the Major, with a touch of severity; "what's all this about Doctor Aherne?"
Mrs. Twomey rose from her knees, dried her little scarlet claws in her apron, and stood to attention. Having opened the debate by calling fervently upon her God to witness that she knew nothing of the matter, she proceeded, like a solo pianist, to run her fingers, as it were, lightly over the keys. Passing swiftly from her own birth, upbringing, invincible respectability, and remoteness from all neighbours, or knowledge of neighbours, she coruscated in a cadenza in which the families of Talbot-Lowry and Coppinger, and her devotion to both, were dazzlingly blended, and finished in a grand chord on the apparently irrelevant fact that she would die dead before she would put down any dirty stain before the Major's honour.
"But Mary," interposed Frederica, with an inartistic directness that was in painful contrast to the cadenza, "what has the Major got to say to Doctor Aherne?"
The question was ignored; the artist dashed on into a presto movement, in which, as far as any direct theme was discernible, Dr. Mangan, his cupidity, his riches, the riches of Dr. Aherne's parents were the leading motives. Also, parenthetically, that Danny Aherne was without shoe or stocking to his foot when he was going to school in Pribawn with her own poor little boy. "And look at him now!" continued Mrs. Twomey, on a high reciting note, and still presto, "with his car and his horse, and his coat with an owld cat skin for a collar on it, and his Tommy-shirts without tails!"
There was an instant of pause, and Frederica breathed the words "'Dicky' shirt-fronts!" to her bewildered cousin.
"Himself and the Big Docthor walking the streets of Cluhir like two paycocks!" went on Mrs. Twomey with ever-increasing speed and fury. "Ha! Ha! Didn't I meet him back in Pribawn ere yistherday. 'How great you are in yourself!' says I to him. 'It done _you_ no harm to kill a woman!' says I. 'Mind your own business!' says he to me. 'Throth then, an' I _will_ mind it!' says I, 'an' I'll have plenty to mind it without you! I'll have plenty to mind it without yourself! Dannileen alay!'"
"What on earth are you talking about?" Dick broke in impatiently.