When
he and Kathleen sat together in a corner of the room and John sat
reading a paper and Mrs. O'Brien knitting and reading a book at the
same time, it was as astonishing a sight to him as it would be to you
to see a dozen mermaids playing at the bottom of the sea.
"Isn't it beautiful?" he whispered to Kathleen.
"Isn't what beautiful?" Kathleen asked.
"The way you live here," Terence answered. "All these years, you know,
I have just come out of the hill to go to school, and then I have gone
back again. I have seen the people outside, but I never was in one of
their houses before. And don't you ever dance?"
"Why, of course we do," Kathleen said; "we go to balls sometimes, and
to parties where there is dancing, and then--"
"But do you never dance here, where you live?"
"Oh, yes, sometimes we do, but the rooms are not large enough to do it
very well, you know."
"I never thought before," said Terence, "of people's not dancing all
the time that they were not at work or eating or sleeping. You know
there in the hill they dance a good deal of the time, and I get so
tired of it that it seems to me as if they danced all the time.
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