It was very still. A bar of pearly-grey dawn showed between the filmy
curtains, which stirred with a regular, faint movement, like the puffing
of a sleeper's lips. The tide of the wind, woven in Mr. Stone's fancy of
the souls of men, was at low ebb. Feebly it fanned the houses and hovels
where the myriad forms of men lay sleeping, unconscious of its breath; so
faint life's pulse, that men and shadows seemed for that brief moment
mingled in the town's sleep. Over the million varied roofs, over the
hundred million little different shapes of men and things, the wind's
quiet, visiting wand had stilled all into the wonder state of
nothingness, when life is passing into death, death into new life, and
self is at its feeblest.

And Stephen's self, feeling the magnetic currents of that ebb-tide
drawing it down into murmurous slumber, out beyond the sand-bars of
individuality and class, threw up its little hands and began to cry for
help. The purple sea of self-forgetfulness, under the dim, impersonal
sky, seemed to him so cold and terrible. It had no limit that he could
see, no rules but such as hung too far away, written in the hieroglyphics
of paling stars. He could feel no order in the lift and lap of the wan
waters round his limbs. Where would those waters carry him? To what
depth of still green silence? Was his own little daughter to go down
into this sea that knew no creed but that of self-forgetfulness, that
respected neither class nor person--this sea where a few wandering
streaks seemed all the evidence of the precious differences between
mankind? God forbid it!

And, turning on his elbow, he looked at her who had given him this
daughter. In the mystery of his wife's sleeping face--the face of her
most near and dear to him--he tried hard not to see a likeness to Mr.
Stone. He fell back somewhat comforted with the thought: 'That old chap
has his one idea--his Universal Brotherhood. He's absolutely absorbed in
it. I don't see it in Cis's face a bit. Quite the contrary.'

But suddenly a flash of clear, hard cynicism amounting to inspiration
utterly disturbed him: The old chap, indeed, was so wrapped up in himself
and his precious book as to be quite unconscious that anyone else was
alive. Could one be everybody's brother if one were blind to their
existence? But this freak of Thyme's was an actual try to be everybody's
sister. For that, he supposed, one must forget oneself. Why, it was
really even a