“The man tells Dad, I can see you’re a man that did his bit. Dad says, Och, I did my bit, and the man says, I did me bit, too, and what did it get me but one eye less and a pension that wouldn’t feed a canary.
But Ireland is free, says Dad, and that’s a grand thing.”
“She was very proud of them, not because they were really any better than anybody else’s ballet shoes, but because they had been given her by her mother, and she was the only one with a mother, so it seemed rather grand.”