Gypo jumped to his feet, spilling half his pint. He gazed at her with fright in his eyes and his chest heaved. Then he recognized her and sat down immediately, flurried and confused by his display of excitement. “Hello, Katie,” he muttered, pretending to be vexed, “ye shouldn’t come in that way on a fellah. I look around me an’ there ye are proddin’ me in the ribs. Why the divil didn’t ye shout same as ye always do?” She put the backs of her thin, red-veined hands on her hips and stared at him in amazement, partly real, partly born of that love of emphatic gesture and movement and speech which is a peculiar characteristic of the women of the Dublin slums. Katie was a woman of the slums. Her father had been an employee of the Corporation and her mother was a charwoman. As a girl Katie worked in a biscuit factory. Her own beauty of body and the grinding toil in the factory made her discontented. She joined the Revolutionary Organization. That was six years ago. After that, her first plunge from the straight path of the tremendous respectability and conservatism of the slum woman, she was led by excess of feeling into one pitfall after another. Finally she passed out of the ranks of respectability altogether by being expelled from the Revolutionary Organization on a charge of public prostitution. Now she had become an abandoned woman, known as such even among the prostitutes of the brothel quarter, a drug fiend, a slattern, an irresponsible creature. Traces of her young beauty still remained in the deep blue eyes, that were melancholy and tired and twitched at the edges, in her long lean figure now grown emaciated, in her black hair that strayed carelessly about her face from beneath the rim of her ragged red hat. But the mouth, that tell-tale register of vice, had completely lost the sumptuous but delicate curves of innocent girlhood and blossoming maturity. The lips hung down at the sides. They were swollen in the middle. Their colour had died out and had been renewed with loud vulgarity by cheap paint. The poor tormented soul peered out of the young face, old before the years had time to wrinkle it, sad, hard and stupefied. She thrust out her little chin and turned her head sideways, turning down the corners of her lips farther at one side of her mouth. “I thought as much,” she said slowly, contorting her lips and face as she spoke. “That’s why I came in unknownst and sat down beside ye. I saw ye be chance, me fine buck, as I was talkin’ to Biddy Mac over at the corner opposite Kane’s. So I just prowled in to see ye on the quiet. But it’s clear as daylight that ye don’t want to see me. Not while ye got money to fill yersel’ with porter. It was a different story, wasn’t it, this mornin’ when ye begged the price of a cup o’ tay off me, an’ me that didn’t see the colour of a half-crown for three days runnin’. Oh then——”