When Corley and Lenahan split off while meandering through the city, Lenehan sits down at a restaurant and reflects on the sorry state of his life, using an idiom in the process:
He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts and intrigues. He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never get a home of his own?
The idiom here—“pulling the devil by the tail”—is a common Irish expression meaning experiencing financial hardship or poverty. (Imagine someone being so desperate for income that they follow the devil around, pulling his tail to encourage him to make a deal with them.)
It is notable that Lenehan is struggling so much with money since, as the narrator describes at the beginning of the scene, he orders his food “roughly in order to belie his air of gentility.” In other words, he tries to make his speech match that of the lower-class characters around him in order to make them think he did not come from “gentility” (or a wealthy family). This establishes that Lenehan is experiencing the sort of change in class status common in Ireland in the early 20th century, as formerly well-off families moved into impoverishment as a result of British colonial rule.
