After she was living alone again, Maeve began to write what are clearly her finest stories. They are about a couple named Rose and Hubert Derdon, and they live in that very same small house in a suburb of Dublin. It has a bow window, and there is a tiny grass plot in front, a walled garden in back with flowers and a yellow laburnum. The front door leads into a narrow hall. Past the stairs, down three steps, is the kitchen. The front and back sitting rooms are separated by folding doors. One room is heated by a coal-burning fireplace, the other by a gas fire. Upstairs, there is linoleum on the floor of the back bedroom, none in the front one. The tone of these stories, however, is entirely different.

At the beginning of their married life the Derdons lived in a flat in Dublin, and Hubert had a friend named Frank who was given to fits of merriment that were contagious. But then they moved to this house, and Frank dropped out of their lives, and there is no more laughter. They are now in their fifties. They have only one child, a son named John, who has left home to study for the priesthood. Leaving Rose a prey to fantasies.

At times … she would become terribly excited and run to the front windows knowing that John was coming home, that he was at this exact moment walking along the street carrying his suitcase, and that she would have to wait only a minute or so to get her first sight of him, coming around the corner from the main road. But of course he wasn’t coming, and he wouldn’t be coming, and the excitement inside her would flatten out and stupefy her with its weight, and her disappointment and humiliation at being made a fool of would be as cruel as though what she had felt had really been hope and not what it was, the delirium of loss.