It was very still.  A bar of pearly-grey dawn showed between the filmy curtains, which stirred with a regular, faint movement, like the puffing of a sleeper’s lips.  The tide of the wind, woven in Mr. Stone’s fancy of the souls of men, was at low ebb.  Feebly it fanned the houses and hovels where the myriad forms of men lay sleeping, unconscious of its breath; so faint life’s pulse, that men and shadows seemed for that brief moment mingled in the town’s sleep.  Over the million varied roofs, over the hundred million little different shapes of men and things, the wind’s quiet, visiting wand had stilled all into the wonder state of nothingness, when life is passing into death, death into new life, and self is at its feeblest.

And Stephen’s self, feeling the magnetic currents of that ebb-tide drawing it down into murmurous slumber, out beyond the sand-bars of individuality and class, threw up its little hands and began to cry for help.  The purple sea of self-forgetfulness, under the dim, impersonal sky, seemed to him so cold and terrible.  It had no limit that he could see, no rules but such as hung too far away, written in the hieroglyphics of paling stars.  He could feel no order in the lift and lap of the wan waters round his limbs.  Where would those waters carry him?  To what depth of still green silence?  Was his own little daughter to go down into this sea that knew no creed but that of self-forgetfulness, that respected neither class nor person—­this sea where a few wandering streaks seemed all the evidence of the precious differences between mankind?  God forbid it!

And, turning on his elbow, he looked at her who had given him this daughter.  In the mystery of his wife’s sleeping face—­the face of her most near and dear to him—­he tried hard not to see a likeness to Mr. Stone.  He fell back somewhat comforted with the thought:  ’That old chap has his one idea—­his Universal Brotherhood.  He’s absolutely absorbed in it.  I don’t see it in Cis’s face a bit.  Quite the contrary.’

But suddenly a flash of clear, hard cynicism amounting to inspiration utterly disturbed him:  The old chap, indeed, was so wrapped up in himself and his precious book as to be quite unconscious that anyone else was alive.  Could one be everybody’s brother if one were blind to their existence?  But this freak of Thyme’s was an actual try to be everybody’s sister.  For that, he supposed, one must forget oneself.  Why, it was really even a worse case than that of Mr. Stone!  And to Stephen there was something awful in this thought.

The first small bird of morning, close to the open window, uttered a feeble chirrup.  Into Stephen’s mind there leaped without reason recollection of the morning after his first term at school, when, awakened by the birds, he had started up and fished out from under his pillow his catapult and the box of shot he had brought home and taken to sleep with him.  He seemed to see again those leaden shot with their bluish sheen, and to feel them, round, and soft, and heavy, rolling about his palm.  He seemed to hear Hilary’s surprised voice saying:  “Hallo, Stevie! you awake?”