A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean’s candle butts and fused itself in Stephen’s consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket.  The priest’s voice, too, had a hard jingling tone.  Stephen’s mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest’s face which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus.  What lay behind it or within it?  A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?

—­I meant a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.

—­Undoubtedly, said the dean.

—­One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace.  I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints.  The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different.  I hope I am not detaining you.

—­Not in the least, said the dean politely.

—­No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean—­

—­Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: 
Detain.

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough.

—­To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem.  You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

—­What funnel? asked Stephen.

—­The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.

—­That? said Stephen.  Is that called a funnel?  Is it not a tundish?

—­What is a tundish?

—­That.  The... funnel.

—­Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean.  I never heard the word in my life.

—­It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.

—­A tundish, said the dean reflectively.  That is a most interesting word.  I must look that word up.  Upon my word I must.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable may have turned on the prodigal.  A humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have entered on the stage of jesuit history when that strange play of intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all but given through—­a late-comer, a tardy spirit.  From what had he set out?  Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the establishment.  Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principle men, peculiar