Hubert goes off every morning to the center of town — he is a sales clerk in a men’s outfitters in Grafton Street — and comes home again in the evening. The reader is not allowed past the front gate and can count on the fingers of one hand the times the two characters in these stories are seen going to Mass or walking down O’Connell Street or wandering among the flower beds of St. Stephen’s Green. Totally forlorn without her son to look after, Rose becomes obsessed with her husband’s remoteness. His mind is to the same degree fixed on what he considers her shortcomings — her country ways, her insecurity with strangers, her possessiveness with her son. As a study of one kind of unhappy marriage these stories are surely definitive. When Hubert dresses in the morning the last thing he puts on is a garment of lies, which do not, even so, conceal the fact that where there should have been feeling there is none — only the desire for privacy and solitude. Because he is too clever for her, her anger turns against herself. She is also afraid of him, of what he might say or do if she drives him too far. This in turn increases his anger against her. Their moments of understanding do not bring them closer but instead only serve to drive them farther apart. They try unsuccessfully to deceive each other in very small matters. They both want it to appear that nothing is amiss. Their hatred and anger are almost palpable.

There is much to admire in these ferocious stories — the storytelling art; the prose, which is plain and exquisitely precise, at times passing over into poetry without ever becoming “poetic”; the gift for dramatic confrontations; the ability to suggest something devastating while seeming to be making an innocuous statement; the at times almost clinical descriptions of states of mind. For example:

“When Rose appeared in the doorway Hubert felt such dislike that he smiled.”

And “how could he grieve for what he could not define, or mourn for what had vanished without a trace?”