Grania shivered and felt sick. Something in the look and extraordinary apathy of the woman, something in the hideous squalor of the house, affected her as no poverty--not even that of the Dalys at home--had ever done before. She raked together the embers, and put a few fresh sods of turf on the fire--seeing that the woman of the house was either too ill or too indifferent to do anything--then sat down on a low creepy opposite to her, feeling chilled to the bone and utterly miserable. Something new was at work within her. She did not yet know what it was, but it was a revelation in its way--a revelation as new and as strange as that other revelation two days before in the boat, only that it was exactly the reverse of it. A new idea, a new impression, was again at work within her, only this time it was a new idea, a new impression upon the intolerableness of life, its unspeakable hopelessness, its misery, its dread, unfathomable dismalness. Why _should_ people go on living so? she thought. Why should they go on living at all, indeed? Why, above all, should they marry and bring more wretched creatures into the world, if this was to be the way of it? How stupid, how useless, how horrible it all was! Yes, Honor was right, the priests were right, the nuns were right, they were all right--there was no happiness in the world, none at all--nowhere! Murdough Blake?--well, Murdough Blake would be just like the rest of them, just like every other husband--worse, perhaps, than some. He wanted to marry her, it is true, but why? Because she was strong, because she owned the farm, because she owned Moonyeen, and the pigs, and the little bit of money; because she could keep him in idleness; could keep him, above all, in drink; because he could get more out of her perhaps than he could out of another! She looked suddenly across at the mistress of the house and it seemed to her that she saw herself grown older. Evidently the other had once been a handsome woman, and was not even now old, only worn out with ill-health, many children, much work, much misery. Her left hand, which she held mechanically towards the now rising blaze, was so thin that the wedding-ring seemed to be dropping off; her hair was still black, and hung about her emaciated face in draggled-looking coils and wisps like seaweed. Staring at her in the dusk of that miserable hearth Grania seemed to see herself a dozen years later: broken down in spirit; broken down in health; grown prematurely old; her capacity for work diminished; with a brood of squalid, ill-fed children clamouring for what she had not to give them; with no help; with Honor long dead; without a soul left who had known her and cared for her when she was young; with shame and a workhouse on the mainland--deepest of all degradation to an islander--coming hourly nearer and nearer, and a maudlin, helpless, eternally drunken--