He was passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order.  Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom.  The voice of the director urging upon him the proud claims of the church and the mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory.  His soul was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the exhortation he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale.  He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest.  His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders.  The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick.  He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.

The snares of the world were its ways of sin.  He would fall.  He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant.  Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

He crossed the bridge over the stream of the Tolka and turned his eyes coldly for an instant towards the faded blue shrine of the Blessed Virgin which stood fowl-wise on a pole in the middle of a ham-shaped encampment of poor cottages.  Then, bending to the left, he followed the lane which led up to his house.  The faint Sour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the river.  He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.  Then a short laugh broke from his lips as he thought of that solitary farmhand in the kitchen gardens behind their house whom they had nicknamed the man with the hat.  A second laugh, taking rise from the first after a pause, broke from him involuntarily as he thought of how the man with the hat worked, considering in turn the four points of the sky and then regretfully plunging his spade in the earth.

He pushed open the latchless door of the porch and passed through the naked hallway into the kitchen.  A group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table.  Tea was nearly over and only the last of the second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small glass jars and jampots which did service for teacups.  Discarded crusts and lumps of sugared bread, turned brown by the tea which had been poured over them, lay scattered on the table.  Little wells of tea lay here and there on the board, and a knife with a broken ivory handle was stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover.