This made him pleased with her, for he liked people to like him, and when he thought they specially did so he paid them the supreme compliment of talking about himself. He did this then, as they clop-clopped through the peaceful downhill streets; he told her who he was, of his recent arrival in Ireland, his mission to report on that disturbed country for an American magazine, his real ambition, which was quite different, and the extreme likelihood that he would one day be famous. He talked to her, indeed, as he could always do to anyone (whether celebrity or bell-hop) when he felt in the mood or thought it worth while—as if he had known and would continue to know them all his life, and as if neither his nor theirs could possibly have been complete before the meeting. It was a technique that had won him both friends and enemies, and would have perhaps worked out all right on balance if he had ever felt a need to discover who were which.

Carey, on her part, was warming to the relief of finding him not another gunman, and the warmth put her at odds with herself for having been so mistaken. She listened to his chatter in a daze, unwilling to try her voice lest there might still be too much tremor in it. By the time they reached the centre of the town she had said scarcely a word, and was already chagrined to find him so content with her silence. The looks she gave him were increasingly quizzical. “Well, here we are,” she said at length, pulling up at a corner.

“Already? This is as far as you go? Well, thanks. Very good of you. Can I get a street car from here into Dublin?”

STREET CAR? “Oh yes, of course. They stop over there.” She pointed.

“Much obliged for the lift,” he said, climbing down with caution. She noticed he was not very agile. “It’s a hot day,” he added, mopping his forehead. “How about having a cup of tea somewhere?”

“And what would I do with the horse?” She half smiled, not so much to him as to herself about him. Maybe he thought a two-year-old would wait at the kerb like a car—a city fellow, evidently (she was wrong about that, for he came from Iowa, but she was basically right, since he had always been peculiarly inept at country ways). Paul Saffron. He had told her his name but had shown no curiosity about hers, and that too had rankled, giving her a sudden defensive pride in being Irish, and in the duality of Irish life that made nobody either countrified or citified to an absurd extent.

He was still mopping his forehead. “I wonder, then, is there a place I could get some ice-cold beer?”

“Ice in Dunleary in the month of August?” She shook her head at a rueful angle… PAUL SAFFRON. “And besides, the pubs aren’t open yet.”

“I see. Like the English. I thought you were free of them now.”

“Sure, but they had us so long we learned all their bad habits.”

He grinned. (More for his article. Irish counterpart of the New York taxi-driver—never at a loss for an answer.) “You said some name just then that I didn’t quite catch?”

“Dunleary? It’s the new name for Kingstown. Or rather the old name before our oppressors changed it. So we changed it back. It’s spelt Dun Laoghaire… And Dublin is Baile Atha Cleath.”

“Tell me that again. How must I say it?”

“Better not say it at all, or nobody’ll know what you’re talking about. It’s a craze they have these days for turning everything into Gaelic. Dublin’s still good enough for most people.” She gave ‘Dublin’ this time the caressing, almost Brooklynese vowels of the patois.

He looked as if the whole subject of place names and pronunciations were infinitely beyond his comprehension, for he had heard again that peculiar note in her voice that set him listening without taking in the words. It made him, from the sidewalk, give her a slow upward scrutiny and then put the question that had been in his mind from the first. “What’s the matter with your leg?” For she was still sitting on it.

“‘Tis broke,” she answered.

Her voice was so much in his ears that he didn’t immediately show that he caught the joke; and this, it seemed, was an extra joke at his expense, for after a few full seconds of relish she drove off laughing.

* * * * *

When she got back to the house on the hill, she could not stop thinking about the American, for he had told her, amongst so much else, that though his current task was journalism, he had directed plays in New York and the real love of his life was the theatre. Which would have been a natural cue for her to tell him about herself, but she had failed to do so, partly because she was still recovering from the initial shock of the meeting, but chiefly because his complete absorption in his own affairs had teased her to a more and more deliberate concealment of hers.