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“[T]he invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad on Saturday night.”
Eveline takes care of her family after her mother’s death. The narrator reveals that her father becomes verbally abusive when drunk, a weekly occurrence. Nevertheless, Eveline must convince him to hand over some money so that she can do the weekly shopping. She fears the weekly struggle with her father will escalate into battery but, as an unmarried woman, she exists entirely at her father’s whim. Her abusive relationship with her father, among others, makes Eveline feel ready to leave Ireland and start a new life, one that grants her more agency.
“As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being--that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled…”
Before she dies, Eveline’s mother made her promise that she would take her mother’s place and run the home in her absence. Eveline finds this task suffocating but, as a young woman living in early 20th-century Dublin, she does not have the autonomy to stray outside of the domestic sphere. Joyce uses the word “spell” to demonstrate that Eveline feels trapped by the allotted paths for women in her society. She watched helplessly as her mother lived and died at the whim of her father and is terrified that she will suffer her mother’s fate if she stays in Dublin.
