S O'FLAHERTY [giving way to wild grief]. Ochone! ochone! my son's
turned agen me. Oh, what'll I do at all at all? Oh! oh! oh! oh!

SIR PEARCE [running out of the house]. What's this infernal noise? What
on earth is the matter?

O'FLAHERTY. Arra hold your whisht, mother. Don't you see his honor?

MRS O'FLAHERTY. Oh, Sir, I'm ruined and destroyed. Oh, won't you
speak to Dinny, Sir: I'm heart scalded with him. He wants to marry a
Frenchwoman on me, and to go away and be a foreigner and desert his
mother and betray his country. It's mad he is with the roaring of the
cannons and he killing the Germans and the Germans killing him, bad cess
to them! My boy is taken from me and turned agen me; and who is to take
care of me in my old age after all I've done for him, ochone! ochone!

O'FLAHERTY. Hold your noise, I tell you. Who's going to leave you? I'm
going to take you with me. There now: does that satisfy you?

MRS O'FLAHERTY. Is it take me into a strange land among heathens and
pagans and savages, and me not knowing a word of their language nor them
of mine?

O'FLAHERTY. A good job they don't: maybe they'll think you're talking
sense.

MRS O'FLAHERTY. Ask me to die out of Ireland, is it? and the angels not
to find me when they come for me!

O'FLAHERTY. And would you ask me to live in Ireland where I've been
imposed on and kept in ignorance, and to die where the divil himself
wouldn't take me as a gift, let alone the blessed angels? You can come
or stay. You can take your old way or take my young way. But stick in
this place I will not among a lot of good-for-nothing divils that'll not
do a hand's turn but watch the grass growing and build up the stone wall
where the cow walked through it. And Sir Horace Plunkett breaking his
heart all the time telling them how they might put the land into decent
tillage like the French and Belgians.

SIR PEARCE. Yes, he's quite right, you know, Mrs O'Flaherty: quite right
there.

MRS O'FLAHERTY. Well, sir, please God the war will last a long time yet;
and maybe I'll die before it's over and the separation allowance stops.

O'FLAHERTY. That's all you care about. It's nothing but milch cows we
men are for the women, with their separation allowances, ever since the
war began, bad luck to them that made it!

TERESA [coming from the porch between the General and Mrs O'Flaherty.]
Hannah sent me out for to tell you, sir, that the tea will be black and
the cake not fit to eat with the c