and to shrink from their company.  A vision of their life, which his father’s words had been powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the word cut in the desk.  A broad-shouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a jack-knife, seriously.  Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his handiwork.  One jogged his elbow.  The big student turned on him, frowning.  He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had tan boots.

Stephen’s name was called.  He hurried down the steps of the theatre so as to be as far away from the vision as he could be and, peering closely at his father’s initials, hid his flushed face.

But the word and the vision capered before his eyes as he walked back across the quadrangle and towards the college gate.  It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind.  His monstrous reveries came thronging into his memory.  They too had sprung up before him, suddenly and furiously, out of mere words.  He had soon given in to them and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intellect, wondering always where they came from, from what den of monstrous images, and always weak and humble towards others, restless and sickened of himself when they had swept over him.

—­Ay, bedad!  And there’s the Groceries sure enough! cried Mr Dedalus.  You often heard me speak of the Groceries, didn’t you, Stephen.  Many’s the time we went down there when our names had been marked, a crowd of us, Harry Peard and little Jack Mountain and Bob Dyas and Maurice Moriarty, the Frenchman, and Tom O’Grady and Mick Lacy that I told you of this morning and Joey Corbet and poor little good-hearted Johnny Keevers of the Tantiles.

The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in the sunlight.  A team of cricketers passed, agile young men in flannels and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicket-bag.  In a quiet bystreet a German band of five players in faded uniforms and with battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of street arabs and leisurely messenger boys.  A maid in a white cap and apron was watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of limestone in the warm glare.  From another window open to the air came the sound of a piano, scale after scale rising into the treble.

Stephen walked on at his father’s side, listening to stories he had heard before, hearing again the names of the scattered and dead revellers who had been the companions of his father’s youth.  And a faint sickness sighed in his heart.

He recalled his own equivocal position in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind.  The letters cut in the stained wood of the desk stared upon him, mocking his bodily weakness and futile enthusiasms and making him loathe himself for his own mad and filthy orgies.  The spittle in his throat grew bitter and foul to swallow and the faint sickness climbed to his brain so that for a moment he closed his eyes and walked on in darkness.