The Way Home Read Free Page A

mother of ours; but I do long to see you both, my children, and to get my arms round you. Your room is ready, the bed made and aired -- Lisby has only to run the bed-warmer over the sheets for the last time. My home is small as you know, Polly, but you shall have a royal welcome, my dears, and I hope will make it yours till you have one of your own again.
    "A royal welcome indeed, Mary! . . . one may say our first genuine welcome to England," declared Mahony; and threw, in thought, a caustic side-glance at the letters he had received from his own people since landing: Irish letters, charming in phrase and sentiment, but -- to his own Irish eyes -- only partially cloaking the writers' anxiety lest, as a result of his long absence from the country, he should take Irish words at their face value, take what was but the warm idea of an invitation for the thing itself, and descend to quarter himself upon them. "Now what do you say, love? Shall we pack our traps and be off? Yes, yes, I suppose I shall have to gulp down another cup of these dregs . . . that masquerade as coffee."
    "Ssh, Richard! . . . not so loud." Mary spoke huskily, being in the grip of a heavy cold and muffled to the chin. "I should like it, of course. But remember, in engaging these rooms you mentioned a month -- if not six weeks."
    "I did, I know. But . . . . Well, my dear, to speak frankly the sooner I walk out of them for the last time the better I'll be pleased. How the deuce that hotel we stopped at had the effrontery to recommend them staggers me!" And with aversion Mahony let his eye skim the inseparable accompaniments of a second class London lodging: the stained and frayed table linen, cracked, odd china, dingy hangings; the cheap, dusty coal, blind panes, smut-strewn sills. "Fitzroy Square indeed! By hanging out of the window till I all but over-reach myself, to catch a glimpse of a single sooty tree branch. And the price we're asked to pay for the privilege! I assure you, Mary, though we had fork out rent for the full six weeks, we should save in the end by going. The three we've been here have made a sad hole in my pocket."
    "Yes. But of course we've done some rather extravagant things, dear. Cabs everywhere -- because of your silly prejudice against me using the omnibus. Then that concert. . . the Nightingale, I forget her name . . . and the Italian Opera, and Adelina Patti. I said at the time you should have left me at home; you could have told me all about it afterwards. What with gloves and bouquet and head-dress, it must have cost close on five pounds."
    "And pray are we to be here at last, in the very heart of things, with twenty years' rust -- oh, well! very nearly twenty -- to rub off, and yet go nowhere and hear nothing? No, wife, that's not the money I begrudge. All the same, just let me tell you what our stay in London has run to -- I totted it up at three A.M. when those accursed milk-wagons began to rattle by" -- and here he did aloud for Mary's benefit a rapid sum in mental arithmetic. "What do you say to that? -- No, I know I haven't," he answered another objection on her part. "But on second thoughts, I've decided to postpone seeing over hospitals and medical schools till I'm settled in practice again, and have a fixed address on my pasteboards. I shall then get a good deal more deference shown me than I should at present, a mere nobody, sprung from the dickens knows where."
    He had lighted the after-breakfast pipe he could now allow himself, and pacing the room with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets went on: "This sense of insignificance regularly haunts me. I'm paying, I expect, for having lived so long in a place like Ballarat, where it was easy to imagine oneself a personage of importance. Here, all such vanity is soon crushed out of one. The truth of the matter is, London's too big for me; I don't feel equal to it -- I believe one can lose the habit of great cities, just like any other. And sometimes, especially since you've