A Chapter that you can Skip

Terence, in his turn, did not always treat Kathleen well, any more than he did anybody else. He was ill-natured with her and he played tricks on her that were not pleasant at all, and yet he wanted to be always with her. Perhaps it was partly because she was more kind to him than anybody else, except Ellen. For nobody else liked him. And if he was bad-tempered and unkind to other people, it made other people unkind and bad-tempered to him, but nothing could make Kathleen unkind to anybody.

"It's not fair you all are to Terence," Ellen said once to Mrs. O'Brien, "to think bad of him the way you do. There's things about him that don't seem right, I know, but those things don't show the way he really is. I dunno if I'm making you understand me. I'm his mother and I know him better nor anybody else, and I know he's different from the way he seems to you, and even the way he seems to me sometimes. And I'll tell you how I know that. When I'm asleep I often dream about him. And when I dream about him, he looks a little the way he does other times, but he's taller and he's better-looking in the face, and he looks stronger and brighter and healthier like. And he speaks to me, and his voice is lower and pleasanter in the sound of it. And that's the way he'ld be, I know, if he had his health, poor child, and if everything was right with him. And you'ld all know that and you'ld feel more for him, if you knew him the way I do."

This was when Terence was six or seven years old. And Ellen often spoke in this way afterward. She saw Terence in her dreams, and he was a very different Terence from the one who made her so much trouble when she was awake, and yet he was partly the same.

And there was one thing that Terence did that almost everybody liked. I might as well say everybody except Kathleen. He played the fiddle. Nobody knew how he learned. There was a neighbor of the Sullivans who came from the same county in Ireland that they did, and he played a fiddle in an orchestra at a cheap theatre.