The spirit moving him, he would much have liked to follow Jack Tar’s good example and leave the likeness there for a very few minutes to speak for itself on the plea he … so that the other could drink in the beauty for himself, her stage presence being, frankly, a treat in itself which the camera could not at all do justice to. But it was scarcely professional etiquette so, though it was a warm pleasant sort of a night now yet wonderfully cool for the season considering, for sunshine after storm … And he did feel a kind of need there and then to follow suit like a kind of inward voice and satisfy a possible need by moving a motion. Nevertheless, he sat tight, just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased by opulent curves, none the worse for wear, however, and looked away thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the other’s possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving embonpoint. In fact, the slight soiling was only an added charm, like the case of linen slightly soiled, good as new, much better, in fact, with the starch out. Suppose she was gone when he? … I looked for the lamp which she told me came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of his because he then recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses (sic) in it which must have fell down sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot with apologies to Lindley Murray.
The vicinity of the young man he certainly relished, educated, distingué, and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the bunch, though you wouldn’t think he had it in him … yet you would. Besides he said the picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was, though at the moment she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of makebelieve went on about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur with the usual splash page of letterpress about the same old matrimonial tangle alleging misconduct with professional golfer or the newest stage favourite instead of being honest and aboveboard about the whole business. How they were fated to meet and an attachment sprang up between the two so that their names were coupled in the public eye was told in court with letters containing the habitual mushy and compromising expressions, leaving no loophole, to show that they openly cohabited two or three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and relations, when the thing ran its normal course, became in due course intimate. Then the decree nisi and the King’s Proctor to show cause why and, he failing to quash it, nisi was made absolute. But as for that, the two misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one another, could safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor, who filed a petition for the party wronged in due course. He, Bloom, enjoyed the distinction of being close to Erin’s uncrowned king in the flesh when the thing occurred in the historic fracas when the fallen leader’s—who notoriously stuck to his guns to the last drop even when clothed in the mantle of adultery—(leader’s) trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a dozen or possibly even more than that penetrated into the printing works of the Insuppressible or no it was United Ireland (a by no means, by the by appropriate appellative) and broke up the typecases with hammers or something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from the facile pens of the O’Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging occupation, reflecting on the erstwhile tribune’s private morals. Though palpably a radically altered man, he was still a commanding figure, though carelessly garbed as usual, with that look of settled purpose which went a long way with the shillyshallyers till they discovered to their vast discomfiture that their idol had feet of clay, after placing him upon a pedestal, which she, however, was the first to perceive. As those were particularly hot times in the general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a minor injury from a nasty prod of some chap’s elbow in the crowd that of course congregated lodging some place about the pit of the stomach, fortunately not of a grave character. His hat (Parnell’s) was inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost celerity) who, panting and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away from his hat at the time, being a gentleman born with a stake in the country, he, as a matter of fact, having gone into it more for the kudos of the thing than anything else, what’s bred in the bone, instilled into him in infancy at his mother’s knee in the shape of knowing what good form was came out at once because he turned round to the donor and thanked him with perfect aplomb, saying: Thank you, sir
though in a very different tone of voice from the ornament of the legal profession whose headgear Bloom also set to rights earlier in the course of the day, history repeating itself with a difference, after the burial of a
