Eveline

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.
Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. Onetime there used to be a field there in which they used to play everyevening with other people's children. Then a man from Belfast boughtthe field and built houses in it--not like their little brown houses but
bright brick houses with shining roofs. children of the avenue used
to play together in that field--Devines, the Waters, the Dunns,
little Keogh cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest,
however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to
hunt them in out of field with his blackthorn stick; but usually
little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father
coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was
not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time
ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother
was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and Waters had gone back to
England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the
others, to leave her home.
Home! She looked round room, reviewing all its familiar objects
which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on
earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those
familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided.
And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of
priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above broken
harmonium beside the coloured print of promises made to Blessed
Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father.
Whenever he showed photograph to a visitor her father used to pass
it with a casual word:
"He is in Melbourne now."
She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She
tried to weigh each side of question. In her home anyway she had
shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about
her. O course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business.
What would they say of her in