—­Our mighty mother!  Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face.

—­The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said.  That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.

—­Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

—­You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said.  I’m hyperborean as much as you.  But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her.  And you refused.  There is something sinister in you ...

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek.  A tolerant smile curled his lips.

—­But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself.  Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all!

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve.  Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.  Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.  Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him.  The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid.  A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

—­Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice.  I must give you a shirt and a few noserags.  How are the secondhand breeks?

—­They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

—­The mockery of it, he said contentedly.  Secondleg they should be.  God knows what poxy bowsy left them off.  I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey.  You’ll look spiffing in them.  I’m not joking, Kinch.  You look damn well when you’re dressed.

—­Thanks, Stephen said.  I can’t wear them if they are grey.

—­He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror.  Etiquette is etiquette.  He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

—­That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have g.p.i.  He’s up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman.  General paralysis of the insane!

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea.  His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth.  Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.