plan however if you don’t know how to end the conversation.  Ask them a question they ask you another.  Good idea if you’re stuck.  Gain time.  But then you’re in a cart.  Wonderful of course if you say:  good evening, and you see she’s on for it:  good evening.  O but the dark evening in the Appian way I nearly spoke to Mrs Clinch O thinking she was.  Whew!  Girl in Meath street that night.  All the dirty things I made her say.  All wrong of course.  My arks she called it.  It’s so hard to find one who.  Aho!  If you don’t answer when they solicit must be horrible for them till they harden.  And kissed my hand when I gave her the extra two shillings.  Parrots.  Press the button and the bird will squeak.  Wish she hadn’t called me sir.  O, her mouth in the dark!  And you a married man with a single girl!  That’s what they enjoy.  Taking a man from another woman.  Or even hear of it.  Different with me.  Glad to get away from other chap’s wife.  Eating off his cold plate.  Chap in the Burton today spitting back gumchewed gristle.  French letter still in my pocketbook.  Cause of half the trouble.  But might happen sometime, I don’t think.  Come in, all is prepared.  I dreamt.  What?  Worst is beginning.  How they change the venue when it’s not what they like.  Ask you do you like mushrooms because she once knew a gentleman who.  Or ask you what someone was going to say when he changed his mind and stopped.  Yet if I went the whole hog, say:  I want to, something like that.  Because I did.  She too.  Offend her.  Then make it up.  Pretend to want something awfully, then cry off for her sake.  Flatters them.  She must have been thinking of someone else all the time.  What harm?  Must since she came to the use of reason, he, he and he.  First kiss does the trick.  The propitious moment.  Something inside them goes pop.  Mushy like, tell by their eye, on the sly.  First thoughts are best.  Remember that till their dying day.  Molly, lieutenant Mulvey that kissed her under the Moorish wall beside the gardens.  Fifteen she told me.  But her breasts were developed.  Fell asleep then.  After Glencree dinner that was when we drove home.  Featherbed mountain.  Gnashing her teeth in sleep.  Lord mayor had his eye on her too.  Val Dillon.  Apoplectic.

There she is with them down there for the fireworks.  My fireworks.  Up like a rocket, down like a stick.  And the children, twins they must be, waiting for something to happen.  Want to be grownups.  Dressing in mother’s clothes.  Time enough, understand all the ways of the world.  And the dark one with the mop head and the nigger mouth.  I knew she could whistle.  Mouth made for that.  Like Molly.  Why that highclass whore in Jammet’s wore her veil only to her nose.  Would you mind, please, telling me the right time?  I’ll tell you the right time up a dark lane.  Say prunes and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips.  Caressing the little boy too.  Onlookers see most of the game.  Of course they understand birds, animals, babies.  In their line.