the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement
as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to
look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with
a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other
things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than
those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being
white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it
went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being
bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one
ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t
either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight
of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so
immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would
fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come,
to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little
strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And
then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle
burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and
it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah!
they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft,
sweet, soft!
Then all melted away dewily in the grey air : all was silent. Ah! She glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl. He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been. He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell.
Cissy Caffrey whistled, imitating the boys in the football field to show what a great person she was : and then she cried :
— Gerty! Gerty! We’re going. Come on. We can see from farther up.
Gerty had an idea, one of love’s little ruses. She slipped a hand into her