bour obviously was, should waste his valuable time
with profligate women who might present him with a nice dose to last him
his lifetime. In the nature of single blessedness he would one day take
unto himself a wife when Miss Right came on the scene but in the interim
ladies' society was a _conditio sine qua non_ though he had the gravest
possible doubts, not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen
about Miss Ferguson (who was very possibly the particular lodestar who
brought him down to Irishtown so early in the morning), as to whether he
would find much satisfaction basking in the boy and girl courtship idea
and the company of smirking misses without a penny to their names bi or
triweekly with the orthodox preliminary canter of complimentplaying and
walking out leading up to fond lovers' ways and flowers and chocs. To
think of him house and homeless, rooked by some landlady worse than any
stepmother, was really too bad at his age. The queer suddenly things
he popped out with attracted the elder man who was several years the
other's senior or like his father but something substantial he certainly
ought to eat even were it only an eggflip made on unadulterated maternal
nutriment or, failing that, the homely Humpty Dumpty boiled.

--At what o'clock did you dine? he questioned of the slim form and tired
though unwrinkled face.

--Some time yesterday, Stephen said.

--Yesterday! exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow
Friday. Ah, you mean it's after twelve!

--The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself.

Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence Bloom reflected.
Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy there
somehow was as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the
one train of thought. At his age when dabbling in politics roughly
some score of years previously when he had been a _quasi_ aspirant to
parliamentary honours in the Buckshot Foster days he too recollected in
retrospect (which was a source of keen satisfaction in itself) he had
a sneaking regard for those same ultra ideas. For instance when the
evicted tenants question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in
people's mind though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper
or pinning his faith absolutely to its dictums, some of which wouldn't
exactly hold water, he at the outset in principle at all events was in
thorough sympathy with peasant possession a