He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant
smile curled his lips.
--But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest
mummer of them all!
He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against
his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve.
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in
a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its
loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her
breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of
wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a
great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and
skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood
beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up
from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
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