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herself, or sat beside her more than once. The classes were much larger than the classes she had attended at home and she wondered if this was why the instructors went so slowly.

The law instructor, who took the class after the break on Wednesdays, was clearly Jewish; she thought that the name Rosenblum was Jewish, but he also made jokes about being Jewish and spoke in a foreign accent that she guessed was not Italian. He talked big, asking them all the time to imagine that they were the president of a large corporation, larger than that owned by Henry Ford, being sued by another corporation or by the federal government. He then drew their attention to real cases in which the issues he had outlined were actually argued. He knew the names of the lawyers who had done the arguing and the track records and the temperaments of the judges who decided the cases and the further judges of the appeal courts.

Eilis had no trouble understanding Mr. Rosenblum’s accent, and even when he made mistakes in grammar or syntax or used the wrong word she could follow him. Like the other students, she took notes when he spoke, but she could find nothing in her book on basic commercial law about most of the cases he mentioned. When she wrote home about Brooklyn College, she tried to describe to her mother and Rose some of the jokes Mr. Rosenblum made in which there was always a Pole and an Italian; it was easier to describe the atmosphere he created, how much the students looked forward to Wednesdays after the break, and how easy and exciting he made corporate litigation sound. But she worried about the exam questions that Mr. Rosenblum would set. One day after class, she asked one of her fellow students, a young man with glasses and curly hair and a friendly yet studious appearance.

“Maybe we’d better ask him what book he’s reading from,” the young man said and looked worried for a moment.

“I don’t think he’s reading from a book,” Eilis said.

“Are you British?”

“No, Irish.”

“Oh, Irish,” he said and nodded and smiled. “Well, see you next week. Maybe we can ask him then.”

The weather grew cold and sometimes in the morning it was icy when the wind blew. She had read her law book twice and taken notes on it and bought a second book that Mr. Rosenblum had recommended and it lay on her bedside table close to the alarm clock, which rang each morning at seven fifty-five just as Sheila Heffernan was starting her shower in the bathroom across the landing. What she loved most about America, Eilis thought on these mornings, was how the heating was kept on all night. She wrote to her mother and Rose and to Jack and the boys about it. The air was like toast, she said, even on winter mornings, and you had no fear when getting out of bed that your feet were going to freeze on the floor. And if you woke in the night with the wind outside howling, you could turn over happily in your warm bed. Her mother wrote back wondering how Mrs. Kehoe could afford to keep the heating on all night, and Eilis replied to say that it was not just Mrs. Kehoe, who was not in any way extravagant, it was everyone in America, they all kept their heating on all night.

As she began to buy Christmas presents to send to her mother and Rose, and Jack, Pat and Martin, checking how early she would have to post them so that they would arrive on time, she pondered on what Christmas Day would be like at Mrs. Kehoe’s kitchen table; she wondered if each of the lodgers would exchange presents. In late November she received a formal letter from Father Flood asking her if she would, as a special favour to him, work in the parish hall on Christmas Day serving dinners to people who did not have anywhere else to go. He knew, he said, that it would be a great sacrifice for her to make.

She wrote back immediately to let him know that, as long as she was not working, she would be available during the Christmas period, including Christmas Day, any time he needed her. She let Mrs. Kehoe know that she would not be spending Christmas in the house, but working for Father Flood.

“Well, I wish you would take a few of the others with