‘For it is the shame and the talk and the disgrace of the world you are getting to be! There is not a man, nor a woman, nor a child, down to the youngest on Inishmaan, but knows you, and knows that it is the truth! Drinking and drinking, and making a heathen beast and fool of yourself, gadding about the town from morning till night, always drinking, drinking, drinking! Is it to make a _baulyore_ of myself that I would be giving you my money and be marrying you? then I will not do it, so do not think it. I will not make a _baulyore_ of myself for any man that ever was born. Do you think it is the wife of a man like Shan Daly that I want to be? to be working and working for ever, and him drinking the whole world dry, and spending the money faster than I could make it if I had six hands, and more? No, indeed, that is not the sort of man I will marry, so I will not! It is a good man, and a sober man, and a decent man I will have, and no other will serve me, not if he were the only man in the whole world and the king of it, so you need not think it! And that is my last word to you, so it is, Murdough Blake, my very last word, God help me, therefore you may believe me.’ She stopped short, hot and panting. The words had rushed out with a fluency quite unlike her usual utterances. They were driven by that fierce current behind them. They came in this form simply because they were longing, but forbidden, to come in quite another one. Murdough was genuinely astonished. Those secret currents, pent up, longing and struggling madly to find an exit, were invisible to him, and quite unsuspected, but that Grania would dream of changing her mind about marrying him had never so much as dawned upon his imagination. If his notions about love and all that belonged to it were of the dimmest, his notions about himself and all that belonged to himself, including his obvious desirability as a husband, were of the clearest and most definite character. Grania belonged, too, to him, always _had_ belonged to him, no one else had ever pretended to rival him in her eyes. Her admiration of him, and of his various gifts and graces, had been patent to all men; she had never concealed it, or attempted to conceal it. All Inishmaan knew that in her eyes there was no one like him either on the island or off the island, and that a mere occasional lapse from sobriety, a mere occasional demand for a little extra ready money, that trifles of this sort could seriously be held a reason for giving him up was too ridiculous an idea to find entry readily into his mind.