How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?

Marry, I wanted it.

Take thou this noble.

Go to!  You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s daughter.  Agenbite of inwit.

Do you intend to pay it back?

O, yes.

When?  Now?

Well ...  No.

When, then?

I paid my way.  I paid my way.

Steady on.  He’s from beyant Boyne water.  The northeast corner.  You owe it.

Wait.  Five months.  Molecules all change.  I am other I now.  Other I got pound.

Buzz.  Buzz.

But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.

I that sinned and prayed and fasted.

A child Conmee saved from pandies.

I, I and I. I.

A.E.I.O.U.

—­Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?  John Eglinton’s carping voice asked.  Her ghost at least has been laid for ever.  She died, for literature at least, before she was born.

—­She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born.  She saw him into and out of the world.  She took his first embraces.  She bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on his deathbed.

Mother’s deathbed.  Candle.  The sheeted mirror.  Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers.  Liliata rutilantium.

I wept alone.

John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.

—­The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly and as best he could.

—­Bosh!  Stephen said rudely.  A man of genius makes no mistakes.  His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian, softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.

—­A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of discovery, one should imagine.  What useful discovery did Socrates learn from Xanthippe?

—­Dialectic, Stephen answered:  and from his mother how to bring thoughts into the world.  What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (ABSIT nomen!), Socratididion’s Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know.  But neither the midwife’s lore nor the caudlelectures saved him from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.

—­But Ann Hathaway?  Mr Best’s quiet voice said forgetfully.  Yes, we seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

His look went from brooder’s beard to carper’s skull, to remind, to chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless though maligned.