Imagine growing up in a house where every day you wake up wishing the day before was a nightmare. You get out of bed, put on your clothes, and know all you have to look forward to is being beaten, threatened and yelled at by one of your parents while you're at home. "Eviline", a story by James Joyce, is about a young girl (Eviline) who is never beaten, but "she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence" (Joyce 4). She faces two choices in the story of which she has to make a decision; she could leave home and maybe find happiness or stay at home with a life that she knew and people that she loved, even though that life was very hard for her. The fear of failing is as old as man can remember. It is an emotion like no other, a mental state that can make a person do anything for self-preservation. Although the story never specifically says Eviline is afraid to leave home and go with Frank. "Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted" (Joyce 5). He was the man she was in love with and was to move to Buenos Ayres and marry him. Eviline describes her home as a bad place in the beginning of the story. Her house was full of dust; "she had to work hard, both in the house and at business" and her dad was abusive (Joyce 4). When she is on her way to the boat to leave with Frank, she starts to contradict herself. She starts to think about her father and home life. She says "her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice." "Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mother's bonnet to make the children laugh" (Joyce 5). Then she remembered her promise to her dying mother "to keep the home together as long as she could" (Joyce 6). Eviline also does not leave home because of the people she will leave and because of her promise to her mother. If Eviline leaves home she sill be leaving her father brothers and other siblings. Eviline will miss Ernest, Harry, and even though her father was abusive she would miss him too. When she is nearing the boat with Frank "Eviline talks about two white letters, she says "the white of two letters grew indistinct" (Joyce 5).