―But he’ll beat you here, said the little old man, tapping his forehead and raising his glass to drain it.
―Well, I hope he’ll be as good a man as his father. That’s all I can say, said Mr. Dedalus.
―If he is, he’ll do, said the little old man.
―And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr. Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.
―But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.
Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.
Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless … ?
He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley’s fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.
Stephen’s mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at the corner of quiet Foster Place while he and his father went up the steps and along the colonnade where the Highland sentry was parading. When