The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure.  They were secret and inflaming but her image was not entangled by them.  That was not the way to think of her.  It was not even the way in which he thought of her.  Could his mind then not trust itself?  Old phrases, sweet only with a disinterred sweetness like the figseeds Cranly rooted out of his gleaming teeth.

It was not thought nor vision though he knew vaguely that her figure was passing homeward through the city.  Vaguely first and then more sharply he smelt her body.  A conscious unrest seethed in his blood.  Yes, it was her body he smelt, a wild and languid smell, the tepid limbs over which his music had flowed desirously and the secret soft linen upon which her flesh distilled odour and a dew.

A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and, putting his thumb and forefinger deftly beneath his loose collar, he caught it.  He rolled its body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for an instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die.  There came to his mind a curious phrase from Cornelius A LAPIDE which said that the lice born of human sweat were not created by God with the other animals on the sixth day.  But the tickling of the skin of his neck made his mind raw and red.  The life of his body, ill clad, ill fed, louse-eaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling from the air and turning often as they fell.  Yes, and it was not darkness that fell from the air.  It was brightness.

    Brightness falls from the air.

He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line.  All the images it had awakened were false.  His mind bred vermin.  His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth.

He came back quickly along the colonnade towards the group of students.  Well then, let her go and be damned to her!  She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest.  Let her.

Cranly had taken another dried fig from the supply in his pocket and was eating it slowly and noisily.  Temple sat on the pediment of a pillar, leaning back, his cap pulled down on his sleepy eyes.  A squat young man came out of the porch, a leather portfolio tucked under his armpit.  He marched towards the group, striking the flags with the heels of his boots and with the ferrule of his heavy umbrella.  Then, raising the umbrella in salute, he said to all: 

—­Good evening, sirs.

He struck the flags again and tittered while his head trembled with a slight nervous movement.  The tall consumptive student and Dixon and O’Keeffe were speaking in Irish and did not answer him.  Then, turning to Cranly, he said: 

—­Good evening, particularly to you.

He moved the umbrella in indication and tittered again.  Cranly, who was still chewing the fig, answered with loud movements of his jaws.