In the evenings I sometimes meet with a girl who is not yet half
through her teens, yet seems in some ways more consciously developed
than any one else that I have met here. She has passed part of her
life on the mainland, and the disillusion she found in Galway has
coloured her imagination.
As we sit on stools on either side of the fire I hear her voice
going backwards and forwards in the same sentence from the gaiety of
a child to the plaintive intonation of an old race that is worn with
sorrow. At one moment she is a simple peasant, at another she seems
to be looking out at the world with a sense of prehistoric
disillusion and to sum up in the expression of her grey-blue eyes
the whole external despondency of the clouds and sea.
Our conversation is usually disjointed. One evening we talked of a
town on the mainland.
'Ah, it's a queer place,' she said: 'I wouldn't choose to live in
it. It's a queer place, and indeed I don't know the place that
isn't.'
Another evening we talked of the people who live on the island or
come to visit it.
