.

--Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,
softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.

--A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of
discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn
from Xanthippe?

--Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts
into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (_absit
nomen!_), Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever
know. But neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlelectures saved him
from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.

--But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem
to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to
chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless
though maligned.

--He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory.
He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling
_The girl I left behind me._ If the earthquake did not time it we should
know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds,
the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, _Venus and
Adonis_, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London.
Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and
beautiful. Do you think the writer of _Antony and Cleopatra_, a
passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose
the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her
and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy.
Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He
was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way.
By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and
twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping
to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford
wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.

And my turn? When?

Come!

--Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,
brightly.

He murmured then with blond delight for all:

_Between the acres of the rye These pretty countryfolk would lie._

Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.