Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?
He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow
of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair with
slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North Circular
road opposite Mr Gavin Low's place of business where she had remained for
a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular fieldglasses
unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles equipped with
inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems, private and hired
landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from the city to the
Phoenix Park and vice versa.
Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?
Because in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel of
bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with continual
changes of the thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds,
velocipedes, vehicles, passing slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round
and round the rim of a round and round precipitous globe.
What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years
deceased?
The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her
suppositious wealth, her lapses of responsiveness and incipient catarrhal
deafness: the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue of the
Immaculate Conception, her green and maroon brushes for Charles Stewart
Parnell and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.
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