The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had touched Stephen pleasantly when first heard for he was as formal in speech with others as they were with him.  Often, as he sat in Davin’s rooms in Grantham Street, wondering at his friend’s well-made boots that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friend’s simple ear the verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skill—­for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael—­repelling swiftly and suddenly by a grossness of intelligence or by a bluntness of feeling or by a dull stare of terror in the eyes, the terror of soul of a starving Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly fear.

Side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess of his uncle Mat Davin, the athlete, the young peasant worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland.  The gossip of his fellow-students which strove to render the flat life of the college significant at any cost loved to think of him as a young fenian.  His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth.  He stood towards the myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided against themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dull-witted loyal serf.  Whatsoever of thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password; and of the world that lay beyond England he knew only the foreign legion of France in which he spoke of serving.

Coupling this ambition with the young man’s humour Stephen had often called him one of the tame geese and there was even a point of irritation in the name pointed against that very reluctance of speech and deed in his friend which seemed so often to stand between Stephen’s mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden ways of Irish life.

One night the young peasant, his spirit stung by the violent or luxurious language in which Stephen escaped from the cold silence of intellectual revolt, had called up before Stephen’s mind a strange vision.  The two were walking slowly towards Davin’s rooms through the dark narrow streets of the poorer jews.

—­A thing happened to myself, Stevie, last autumn, coming on winter, and I never told it to a living soul and you are the first person now I ever told it to.  I disremember if it was October or November.  It was October because it was before I came up here to join the matriculation class.

Stephen had turned his smiling eyes towards his friend’s face, flattered by his confidence and won over to sympathy by the speaker’s simple accent.