Broadbent.  Not to my head, I think.  I have no headache; and I could speak distinctly.  No:  potcheen goes to the heart, not to the head.  What ought I to do?

Larry.  Nothing.  What need you do?

Broadbent.  There is rather a delicate moral question involved.  The point is, was I drunk enough not to be morally responsible for my proposal?  Or was I sober enough to be bound to repeat it now that I am undoubtedly sober?

Larry.  I should see a little more of her before deciding.

Broadbent.  No, no.  That would not be right.  That would not be fair.  I am either under a moral obligation or I am not.  I wish I knew how drunk I was.

Larry.  Well, you were evidently in a state of blithering sentimentality, anyhow.

Broadbent.  That is true, Larry:  I admit it.  Her voice has a most extraordinary effect on me.  That Irish voice!

Larry [sympathetically].  Yes, I know.  When I first went to London I very nearly proposed to walk out with a waitress in an Aerated Bread shop because her Whitechapel accent was so distinguished, so quaintly touching, so pretty—­

Broadbent [angrily].  Miss Reilly is not a waitress, is she?

Larry.  Oh, come!  The waitress was a very nice girl.

Broadbent.  You think every Englishwoman an angel.  You really have coarse tastes in that way, Larry.  Miss Reilly is one of the finer types:  a type rare in England, except perhaps in the best of the aristocracy.

Larry.  Aristocracy be blowed!  Do you know what Nora eats?

Broadbent.  Eats! what do you mean?

Larry.  Breakfast:  tea and bread-and-butter, with an occasional rasher, and an egg on special occasions:  say on her birthday.  Dinner in the middle of the day, one course and nothing else.  In the evening, tea and bread-and-butter again.  You compare her with your Englishwomen who wolf down from three to five meat meals a day; and naturally you find her a sylph.  The difference is not a difference of type:  it’s the difference between the woman who eats not wisely but too well, and the woman who eats not wisely but too little.

Broadbent [furious].  Larry:  you—­you—­you disgust me.  You are a damned fool. [He sits down angrily on the rustic seat, which sustains the shock with difficulty].

Larry.  Steady! stead-eee! [He laughs and seats himself on the table].

Cornelius Doyle, Father Dempsey, Barney Doran, and Matthew Haffigan come from the house.  Doran is a stout bodied, short armed, roundheaded, red-haired man on the verge of middle age, of sanguine temperament, with an enormous capacity for derisive, obscene, blasphemous, or merely cruel and senseless fun, and a violent and impetuous intolerance of other temperaments and other opinions, all this representing energy and capacity wasted and demoralized by want of sufficient training and social pressure to force it into beneficent activity and build a character with it; for Barney is by no means either stupid or weak.  He is recklessly untidy as to his person; but the worst effects of his neglect are mitigated by a powdering of flour and mill dust; and his unbrushed clothes, made of a fashionable tailor’s sackcloth, were evidently chosen regardless of expense for the sake of their appearance.