t the invitation to dinner given then by the son and
afterwards seconded by the father?

Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative
gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a
third connecting link between them?

Mrs Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the
house of Stephen's parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and
had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms
Hotel owned by Elizabeth O'Dowd of 54 Prussia street where, during parts
of the years 1893 and 1894, she had been a constant informant of Bloom
who resided also in the same hotel, being at that time a clerk in the
employment of Joseph Cuffe of 5 Smithfield for the superintendence of
sales in the adjacent Dublin Cattle market on the North Circular road.

Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?

He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow
of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair
with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North
Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low's place of business where she had
remained for a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular
fieldglasses unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles
equipped with inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems,
private and hired landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from
the city to the Phoenix Park and vice versa.

Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?

Because in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel
of bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with
continual changes of the thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds,
velocipedes, vehicles, passing slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round
and round the rim of a round and round precipitous globe.

What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years
deceased?

The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her
suppositious wealth, her lapses of responsiveness and incipient
catarrhal deafness: the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue
of the Immaculate Conception, her green and maroon brushes for Charles
Stewart Parnell and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.

Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve