ntenance here in
Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the
grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever
sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.

Cordelia. _Cordoglio._ Lir's loneliest daughter.

Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.

--Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be
so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...

--O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
correspondence.

--I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.

God ild you. The pigs' paper. Bullockbefriending.

Synge has promised me an article for _Dana_ too. Are we going to be
read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope
you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.

Stephen sat down.

The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask said:

--Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.

He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a
chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:

--Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

--Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
first a sundering.

--Yes.

Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,
from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women
he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices,
bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack
dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as
cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow
grave and unforgiven.

--Yes. So you think...

The door closed behind the outgoer.

Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and
brooding air.

A vestal's lamp.

Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do
had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of
the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when
he lived among women.

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the
voice of that Egyptian highpriest. _In painted chambers loaded with
tilebooks._

They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of
death is in them, to te