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Mrs. Mooney is the daughter of a butcher who makes her living by running a boarding house. She decided to open said boarding house after she separated from her husband. Mrs. Mooney’s husband was a drunk who ruined his own butchering business by consistently fighting with his wife in front of customers, selling bad meat, and spending all of their money on alcohol and gambling. Mrs. Mooney endured the abuse for a while but ultimately decided to leave her husband after he threatened her with a meat cleaver one night. After their separation, Mrs. Mooney’s husband got a job as a sheriff’s man where he sits at a desk every day and waits to be sent on a job by his superiors.
Mrs. Mooney’s boarding house is filled with mostly young men who need an affordable place to stay in Dublin. Many of her boarders are clerks who work in the city, as well as the occasional tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man. Mrs. Mooney’s boarding house is also home to musicians. Regardless of their background, most of Mrs. Mooney’s boarders get along very well with each other because they share common interests and careers. Mrs. Mooney is a “stern” individual who runs a strict and tight business, so much so that she is known by all of her lodgers as “The Madam.”
Mrs. Mooney runs the boarding house with the help of her two children, Jack and Polly, who also live there. Jack is a clerk to a commission agent in Fleet Street with a reputation for being a “hard case.” Polly, a young girl of nineteen, used to work in a corn-factors office but she now stays at home at her mother’s request to amuse the lodgers and help with the cleaning. She often participates in the Sunday night reunion in Mrs. Mooney’s front drawing-room where she sings along with the musicians who are staying at the boarding house.
Surrounded by so many young men, Polly inevitably develops a relationship with one of them, a man named Mr. Doran. Mrs. Mooney becomes aware of the relationship, but instead of sending Polly back to work in the city so as to separate the two lovers and put an end to their affair, Mrs. Mooney instead monitors its developments. Polly becomes increasingly uncomfortable with her mother’s lack of intervention, but Mrs. Mooney waits until “the right moment” to intercede. First she speaks awkwardly with Polly, then arranges to speak with Mr. Doran on a Sunday morning.
