—­You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be 1160 important because I belong to the Faubourg saint Patrice called Ireland for short.

—­I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.

—­But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.

—­What belongs, queried Mr Bloom bending, fancying he was perhaps under some misapprehension.  Excuse me.  Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the latter portion.  What was it you ...?

Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of coffee or whatever you like to call it none too politely, adding:  1170

—­We can’t change the country.  Let us change the subject.

At this pertinent suggestion Mr Bloom, to change the subject, looked down but in a quandary, as he couldn’t tell exactly what construction to put on belongs to which sounded rather a far cry.  The rebuke of some kind was clearer than the other part.  Needless to say the fumes of his recent orgy spoke then with some asperity in a curious bitter way foreign to his sober state.  Probably the homelife to which Mr B attached the utmost importance had not been all that was needful or he hadn’t been familiarised with the right sort of people.  With a touch of fear for the young man beside him whom he furtively scrutinised with an air of some consternation remembering he had just come back from Paris, the eyes more especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister, failing to throw much light on the subject, however, he brought to mind instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves.  For instance there was the case of O’Callaghan, for one, the halfcrazy faddist, respectably connected though of inadequate means, with his mad vagaries among whose other gay doings when rotto and making himself a nuisance to everybody all round he was in the habit of ostentatiously sporting in public a suit of brown paper (a fact).  And then the usual denouement after the fun had gone on fast and furious he got 1190 landed into hot water and had to be spirited away by a few friends, after a strong hint to a blind horse from John Mallon of Lower Castle Yard, so as not to be made amenable under section two of the criminal law amendment act, certain names of those subpoenaed being handed in but not divulged for reasons which will occur to anyone with a pick of brains.  Briefly, putting two and two together, six sixteen which he pointedly turned a deaf ear to, Antonio and so forth, jockeys and esthetes and the tattoo which was all the go in the seventies or thereabouts even in the house of lords because early in life the occupant of the throne, then heir apparent, the other members of the upper ten and other high personages simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state, he reflected about the errors of