Quotation from: Ulysses

Written by: James Joyce


The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of
that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied
trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an
unhealthiness, a FLAIR, for the cruder things of life. A scene disengages
itself in the observer's memory, evoked, it would seem, by a word of so
natural a homeliness as if those days were really present there (as some
thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space of lawn one soft
May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at Roundtown, purple and
white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but with much real
interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over the sward or
collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert shock. And yonder
about that grey urn where the water moves at times in thoughtful
irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey, Atty, Tiny and
their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in her pose then,
Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent from an ear,
bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily against the cool
ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey (blossomtime but
there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long the bowls are
gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by that circle of
girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young man does now
with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but must needs
glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the PIAZZETTA
giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness or of
reproach (ALLES VERGANGLICHE) in her glad look.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
Designed by Joan A. Smith for the CRATE project
Created: 2007-2-22T12:35:29Z
Part of the CratePreservation Project
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.