The last words of Davin’s story sang in his memory and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth reflected in other figures of the peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the college cars drove by, as a type of her race and of his own, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed.

A hand was laid on his arm and a young voice cried: 

—­Ah, gentleman, your own girl, sir!  The first handsel today, gentleman. 
Buy that lovely bunch.  Will you, gentleman?

The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes seemed to him at that instant images of guilelessness, and he halted till the image had vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp coarse hair and hoydenish face.

—­Do, gentleman!  Don’t forget your own girl, sir!

—­I have no money, said Stephen.

—­Buy them lovely ones, will you, sir?  Only a penny.

—­Did you hear what I said? asked Stephen, bending towards her.  I told you
I had no money.  I tell you again now.

—­Well, sure, you will some day, sir, please God, the girl answered after an instant.

—­Possibly, said Stephen, but I don’t think it likely.

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might turn to jibing and wishing to be out of the way before she offered her ware to another, a tourist from England or a student of Trinity.  Grafton Street, along which he walked, prolonged that moment of discouraged poverty.  In the roadway at the head of the street a slab was set to the memory of Wolfe Tone and he remembered having been present with his father at its laying.  He remembered with bitterness that scene of tawdry tribute.  There were four French delegates in a brake and one, a plump smiling young man, held, wedged on a stick, a card on which were printed the words:  Vive L’IRLANDE!

But the trees in Stephen’s Green were fragrant of rain and the rain-sodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts.  The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a moment when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley.

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class.  He crossed the hall and took the corridor to the left which led to the physics theatre.  The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful.  Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful?  Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there?  Or was the jesuit house extra-territorial and was he walking among aliens?  The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.