After this she would go around the flower-beds and look at each; some of them were shaped like stars, and some were quite round, and others again were square. She liked the star-shaped flower-beds best, and next she liked the round ones, and last of all the square. But she loved all the flowers, and used to make up stories about them.
After that, growing hungry, she would go home for her lunch. She went home down Grafton Street and O'Connell Street. She always went along the right-hand side of the street going home, and looked in every shop window that she passed; and then, when she had eaten her lunch, she came out again and walked along the left-hand side of the road, looking at the shops on that side; and so she knew daily everything that was new in the city, and was able to tell her mother at night time that the black dress with Spanish lace was taken out of Manning's window, and a red gown with tucks at the shoulders and Irish lace at the wrists put in its place; or that the diamond ring in Johnson's marked One Hundred Pounds was gone from the case, and that a slide of brooches of beaten silver and blue enamel was there instead.
In the night time her mother and herself went round to each of the theatres in turn and watched the people going in, and looked at the big posters. When they went home afterwards they had supper, and used to try to make out the plots of the various plays from the pictures they had seen, so that generally they had lots to talk about before they went to bed. Mary Makebelieve used to talk most in the night time, but her mother talked most in the morning.
III
Her mother spoke sometimes of matrimony as a thing remote but very certain: the remoteness of this adventure rather shocked Mary Makebelieve; she knew that a girl had to get married, that a strange, beautiful man would come from somewhere looking for a wife, and would retire again with his bride to that Somewhere which is the country of Romance. At times (and she could easily picture it) he rode in armour on a great bay horse, the plume of his helmet trailing among the high leaves of the forest. Or he came standing on the prow of a swift ship with the sunlight blazing back from his golden armour. Or on a grassy plain, fleet as the wind, he came running, leaping, laughing.
When the subject of matrimony was under discussion her mother planned minutely the person of the groom, his vast accomplishments, and yet vaster wealth, the magnificence of his person, and the love in which he was held by rich and poor alike. She also discussed, down to the smallest detail, the elaborate trousseau she would provide for her daughter, the extravagant presents the bridegroom would make to his bride and her maids, and those, yet more costly, which the bridegroom's family would send to the newly-married pair. All these wonders could only concentrate in the person of a lord. Mary Makebelieve's questions as to the status and appurtenances of a lord were searching and minute; her mother's rejoinders were equally elaborate and particular.
At his birth a lord is cradled in silver; at his death he is laid in a golden casket, an oaken coffin, and a leaden outer coffin, until, finally, a massy stone sarcophagus shrouds his remains for ever. His life is a whirl of gaiety and freedom. Around his castle there spread miles upon miles of sunny grass lands and ripened orchards and waving forests, and through these he hunts with his laughing companions or walks gently with his lady. He has servants by the thousand, each anxious to die for him, and his wealth, prodigious beyond the computation of avarice, is stored in underground chambers, whose low, tortuous passages lead to labyrinths of vaults massy and impregnable.
Mary Makebelieve would have loved to wed a lord. If a lord had come to her when she paced softly through a forest, or stood alone on the seashore, or crouched among the long grass of a windy plain, she would have placed her hands in his and followed him and loved him truly for ever. But she did not believe that these things happened nowadays, nor did her mother. Nowadays! her mother looked on these paltry times with an eye whose scorn was complicated by fury. Mean, ugly days! mean, ugly lives! and mean, ugly people! said her mother, that's all one can get nowadays; and then she spoke of the people whose houses she washed out and whose staircases she scrubbed down, and her old-ivory face flamed from her black hair, and her deep, dark eyes whirled and became hard and motionless as points of jet, and her hands jumped alternately into knuckles and claws.
But it became increasingly evident to Mary Makebelieve that marriage was not a story but a fact, and, somehow, the romance of it did not drift away, although the very house wherein she lived was infested by these conjoints, and the streets wherein she walked were crowded with undistinguished couples...Those grey--lived, dreary--natured people had a spark of fire smouldering somewhere in their poor economy. Six feet deep is scarcely deep enough to bury romance, and until that depth of clay has clogged our bones the fire can still smoulder and be fanned, and, perhaps, blaze up and flare across a county or a country to warm the cold hands of many a
