foot)_ O, excuse!

ZOE: _(Promptly)_ Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.

_(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over
her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled
caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances
behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)_

STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto
Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an
old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate _Coela enarrant gloriam Domini._
It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and
mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's
that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip
from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his
almightiness. _Mais nom de nom,_ that is another pair of trousers.
_Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at
Lynch's cap, smiles, laughs)_ Which side is your knowledge bump?

THE CAP: _(With saturnine spleen)_ Bah! It is because it is. Woman's
reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form
of life. Bah!

STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes.
How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!

THE CAP: Bah!

STEPHEN: Here's another for you. _(He frowns)_ The reason is because
the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible
interval which...

THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can't.

STEPHEN: _(With an effort)_ Interval which. Is the greatest possible
ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.

THE CAP: Which?

_(Outside the gramophone begins to blare_ The Holy City.)

STEPHEN: _(Abruptly)_ What went forth to the ends of the world to
traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller,
having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a
moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self
which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. _Ecco!_

LYNCH: _(With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe
Higgins)_ What a learned speech, eh?

ZOE: _(Briskly)_ God help your head, he knows more than you have
forgotten.

_(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)_

FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this summer.

KITTY: No!

ZOE: _(Explode