She wrapped it away, just as anyone could see her—as she might for the moment see herself—folding a blanket down into the crib and tucking the ends. Victor, now stained and fragrant with orange, leapt like a tiger to pop the parcel back overhead.

“No, I shouldn’t think learning Irish would do you much good,” said the Welshman. “No real language.”

“Why not?” said the lady in the raincoat instantly. “I’ve a brother who is a very fluent Irish speaker and a popular man. You cannot doubt yourself that when the English hear you speaking a tongue they cannot follow, in the course of time they are due to start holding respect for you.”

“From London you are.” The Welshman bit down on his pipe and smoked.

“Oh my God.” The man from Connemara struck his head. “I have an English wife. How would she like that, I wouldn’t like to know? If all at once I begun on her in Irish! How would you like it if your husband would only speak to you in Irish? Or Welsh, my God?” He searched the eyes of all the women, and last of the young Irish sweetheart—who did not seem to grasp the question. “Aha ha ha!” he cried urgently and despairingly at her, asking her only to laugh with him.

But the young man’s arm was thrust along the seat and she was sitting under its arch as if it were the entrance to a cave, which surely they all must see.

“Will you eat a biscuit now?” the young wife gently asked the man from Connemara. He took one wordlessly; for the moment he had no English or Irish. So she broke open another paper parcel beside her. “I have oceans,” she said.

“Oh, you wait,” said the lady in the raincoat, rising. And she opened a parcel as big as a barrel and it was full of everything to eat that anybody could come out of England with alive.

She offered candy, jam roll, biscuits, bananas, nuts, sections of bursting orange, and bread and butter, and they all in the flush of the hospitality and heat sat eating. Everybody partook but the Welshman, who had presumably had a dinner in Wales. It was more than ever like a little party, all the finer somehow, sadly enough, for the nose against the windowpane. They poured out tea from a couple of steaming thermoses; the black windows—for the sun was down now, never having been out of the fogs and rains all day—coated warmly over between them and what flew by out there.

“Could you tell me the name of a place to stay in Cork?” The American girl spoke up to the man from Connemara as he gave her a biscuit.