At the top of the stairs, a woman pauses to listen to an old song drifting up from a room she has left, and her husband, watching from below, thinks he has never loved her more. The party is over: a triumph of roast goose and waltzes and clever talk, and Gabriel Conroy, who gave the dinner speech, is sure of his own warmth. Then, in their hotel room that night, Gretta tells him about Michael Furey, a boy in Galway who once stood in the cold rain beneath her window and was dead at seventeen, who loved her with a heat Gabriel has never once brought to anything. Joyce offers no rescue, only the slow, unbearable widening of a man learning that the great passion of his wife's life was never his. Outside, the snow keeps falling, faintly, through the whole dark universe, upon all the living and the dead.