—­Is this a beautiful young lady or a doll that you have here, Mrs Tallon?

Then, bending down to peer at the smiling painted face under the leaf of the bonnet, he exclaimed: 

—­No!  Upon my word I believe it’s little Bertie Tallon after all!

Stephen at his post by the window heard the old lady and the priest laugh together and heard the boys’ murmurs of admiration behind him as they passed forward to see the little boy who had to dance the sunbonnet dance by himself.  A movement of impatience escaped him.  He let the edge of the blind fall and, stepping down from the bench on which he had been standing, walked out of the chapel.

He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the garden.  From the theatre opposite came the muffled noise of the audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers’ band.  The light spread upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings.  A side door of the theatre opened suddenly and a shaft of light flew across the grass plots.  A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz:  and when the side door closed again the listener could hear the faint rhythm of the music.  The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day’s unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before.  His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound:  and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns in her wake.  Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement.  It was the clapping that greeted the entry of the dumbbell team on the stage.

At the far end of the shed near the street a speck of pink light showed in the darkness and as he walked towards it he became aware of a faint aromatic odour.  Two boys were standing in the shelter of a doorway, smoking, and before he reached them he had recognised Heron by his voice.

—­Here comes the noble Dedalus! cried a high throaty voice.  Welcome to our trusty friend!

This welcome ended in a soft peal of mirthless laughter as Heron salaamed and then began to poke the ground with his cane.

—­Here I am, said Stephen, halting and glancing from Heron to his friend.

The latter was a stranger to him but in the darkness, by the aid of the glowing cigarette tips, he could make out a pale dandyish face over which a smile was travelling slowly, a tall overcoated figure and a hard hat.  Heron did not trouble himself about an introduction but said instead: 

—­I was just telling my friend Wallis what a lark it would be tonight if you took off the rector in the part of the schoolmaster.  It would be a ripping good joke.

Heron made a poor attempt to imitate for his friend Wallis the rector’s pedantic bass and then, laughing at his failure, asked Stephen to do it.