Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat, than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

[...]

  —Tell me, Lily, he said in a friendly tone, do you still go to school?
  —O no, sir, she answered. I’m done schooling this year and more.
  —O, then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?
  The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:
  —The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.
  Gabriel coloured, as if he felt he had made a mistake, and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.

[...]

 Gabriel found himself partnered with Miss Ivors. She was a frank-mannered, talkative young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown eyes. She did not wear a low-cut bodice, and the large brooch which was fixed in the front of her collar bore on it an Irish device and motto.
  When they had taken their places she said abruptly:
  —I have a crow to pluck with you.
  —With me? said Gabriel.
  She nodded her head gravely.
  —What is it? asked Gabriel, smiling at her solemn manner.
  —Who is G.C.? answered Miss Ivors, turning her eyes upon him.
  Gabriel coloured and was about to knit his brows, as if he did not understand, when she said bluntly:
  —O, innocent Amy! I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
  —Why should I be ashamed of myself? asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile.
  —Well, I’m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say you’d write for a paper like that. I didn’t think you were a West Briton.

[...; Gabriel and his wife Gretta take a room in the Shelbourne Hotel since the snow is too heavy to return home.]

    -Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about? [...]
  —It was a young boy I used to know, she answered, named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate.
  Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.
  —I can see him so plainly, she said, after a moment. Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them - an expression!
  —O, then, you were in love with him? said Gabriel.
  —I used to go out walking with him, she said, when I was in Galway.
  A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.
  —Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl? he said coldly.
  She looked at him and asked in surprise:
  —What for?
  Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:
  —How do I know? To see him, perhaps.
  She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.
  —He is dead, she said at length. He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?
  —What was he? asked Gabriel, still ironically.
  —He was in the gasworks, she said.
  Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a penny-boy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

[...]

  She paused for a moment and sighed.
  —Poor fellow, she said. He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country. He was going to study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.
  —Well; and then? asked Gabriel.
  —And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him, so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer, and hoping he would be better then.
  She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:
  —Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’ Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn’t see, so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering.
  —And did you not tell him to go back? asked Gabriel.
  —I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree.
  —And did he go home? asked Gabriel.
  —Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!
  She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.
  She was fast asleep.

[...]

  Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
  A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.