picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was, though at the moment
she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of makebelieve went on
about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur with the usual splash page
of letterpress about the same old matrimonial tangle alleging misconduct with
professional golfer or the newest stage favourite instead of being honest and
aboveboard about the whole business. How they were fated to meet and an
attachment sprang up between the two so that their names were coupled in
the public eye was told in court with letters containing the habitual mushy and
compromising expressions, leaving no loophole, to show that they openly
cohabited two or three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and
relations, when the thing ran its normal course, became in due course intimate.
Then the decree nisi and the King’s Proctor to show cause why and, he failing
to quash it, nisi was made absolute. But as for that, the two misdemeanants,
wrapped up as they largely were in one another, could safely afford to ignore
it as they very largely did till the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor,
who filed a petition for the party wronged in due course. He, Bloom, enjoyed
the distinction of being close to Erin’s uncrowned king in the flesh when
the thing occurred in the historic fracas when the fallen leader’s — who
notoriously stuck to his guns to the last drop even when clothed in the
mantle of adultery — (leader’s) trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a
dozen or possibly even more than that penetrated into the prinitng worsk of
the Insuppressible or no it was United Ireland (a by no means, by the by
appropriate appellative) and broke up the typecases with hammers or
something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from the
facile pens of the O’Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging occuaption,
reflecting on the erstwhile tribune’s private morals. Though palpably a
radically altered man, he was still a commanding figure, though carelessly
garbed as usual, with that look of settled purpose which went a long
way with the shillyshallyers till they discovered to their vast discomfiture
that their idol had feet of clay, after placing him upon a pedestal, which she,
however, was the first to perceive. As those were particularly hot times in the
general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a minor injury from a nasty prod of some
chap’s elbow in the crowd that of course congregated lodging some place about
the pit of the stomach, fortunately not of a grave character. His hat (Parnell’s)
was inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was
the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence
meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost
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