The mood of “Two Gallants” is simultaneously upbeat and bleak. Corley and Lenehan seem to be having a good time together—gossiping about their sexual exploits while walking around Dublin on a summer’s night—but, beneath the surface, they are two miserable and broke young men with uncertain futures.
Joyce establishes this contradictory mood in the opening lines of the story:
The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd.
From the beginning, Joyce confuses readers about whether this story is joyful or melancholy—the evening is “grey” (melancholy) but it is also “warm” (joyful), the streets are “shuttered” (melancholy) but also full of a “gaily coloured crowd” (joyful). Even his use of the word “swarmed” for the movements of the crowd implies a frenzied energy that isn’t definitively positive or negative.
The mood moves into a more overtly unhappy register when Corley and Lenehan part ways midway through the story and the narrator moves closer to Lenehan’s internal perspective, sharing his discontented inner thoughts:
He found trivial all that was meant to charm him […] The problem of how he could pass the hours till he met Corley again troubled him a little. He could think of no way of passing them but to keep on walking. He turned to the left when he came to the corner of Rutland Square and felt more at ease in the dark quiet street, the sombre look of which suited his mood.
Here readers get a real peek into the minds of one of the characters and see that Lenehan is far from the sociable and outgoing man they met at the beginning of the story—he is actually quite lonely and sad. He finds “trivial all that was meant to charm him” and can’t “think of no way of passing [the hours] but to keep on walking.” He even directly describes his mood as “somber,” influencing readers' mood as well.
