—Who may he be? he asked. Can you ask? Stephen, the youthful bard.
Dry.
Mr Dedalus, famous father, laid by his dry filled pipe.
—I see, he said. I didn’t recognise him for the moment. I hear he is keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?
He had.
—I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day, said Lenehan. In Mooney’s en ville and in Mooney’s sur mer. He had received the rhino for the labour of his muse.
He smiled at bronze’s teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes.
—The élite of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit. Hugh MacHugh, Dublin’s most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the O’Madden Burke.
After an interval Mr Dedalus raised his grog and
—That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see.
He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye. Set down his glass.
He looked towards the saloon door.
—I see you have moved the piano.
—The tuner was in today, Miss Douce replied, tuning it for the smoking concert and I never heard such an exquisite player.
—Is that a fact?
—Didn’t he, Miss Kennedy? The real classical, you know. And blind too, poor fellow. Not twenty I’m sure he was.
—Is that a fact? Mr Dedalus said.
He drank and strayed away.
—So sad to look at his face, Miss Douce condoled.
God’s curse on bitch’s bastard.
Tink to her pity cried a diner’s bell. To the door of the diningroom came bald Pat, came bothered Pat, came Pat, waiter of Ormond. Lager for diner. Lager without alacrity she served.
With patience Lenehan waited for Boylan with impatience, for jingle jaunty blazes boy.
Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her hand), soft pedalling a triple of keys to sees the thicknesses of felt advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action.
