Hubert knew that look. She only wore it outside the house. Hubert disliked having the order of his day disturbed. He didn’t like to have his breakfast all topsy-turvy, and he didn’t like seeing his wife running around the house at that early hour of a weekday morning with her hat and her gloves on, and her big bulging prayer book in her hand, but what he disliked most of all was to see her go out to face the world wearing the face that she showed to the world, the face that she imagined impressed people — as if anybody ever noticed her. Her pretensions, the pitiful air she wore of being a certain sort of person, irritated him so much that he could hardly bear to look at her on the rare occasions — rare these days, anyway — when they went out together. They had been living in Dublin for over thirty years and she was still the same simple girl from her simple country town, and that was all right, in its way, if she would be content with that, but the minute she got out of the house she started imagining things about herself, as though by imagining, and pretending, she could deceive people into thinking that she was the sort of woman she was not. And what was more, thinking that she could deceive people into thinking that she was a sort of woman that had never existed anywhere, any time, except in her head.