—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, guitless though maligned.
—He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory. He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling The girl I left behind me. If the earthquake did not time it we should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, Venus and Adonis, lay in the bechamber of every light-of-love in London. Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and beautiful. Do you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal. Good: he left her and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.
And my turn? When?
Come!
.—Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly, brightly.
He murmured then with blond delight for all:
Between the acres of the rye
These pretty countryfolk would lie.
Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.
