Quotation from: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Written by: James Joyce


The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to
be sent back to Clongowes. The practice in the park came to an end when
Mike Flynn went into hospital. Aubrey was at school and had only an
hour or two free in the evening. The gang fell asunder and there were
no more nightly forays or battles on the rocks. Stephen sometimes went
round with the car which delivered the evening milk and these chilly
drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no
repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman's coat.
Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to catch a glimpse of
a well scrubbed kitchen or of a softly lighted hall and to see how the
servant would hold the jug and how she would close the door. He thought
it should be a pleasant life enough, driving along the roads every
evening to deliver milk, if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of
gingernuts in his pocket to eat from. But the same foreknowledge which
had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round
the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at
his trainer's flabby stubble-covered face as it bent heavily over his long
stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. In a vague way he
understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason
why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes. For some time he
had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he
had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish
conception of the world. The ambition which he felt astir at times in
the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the
outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare's hoofs clattering
along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and
rattling behind him.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.