Page 191 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

away with it, don’t you?
—It must be troublesome, I imagine.
—Of course it is, of course. Just imagine when I was
in Belgium I used to see them out cycling in all kinds of
weather with this thing up about their knees! It was really
ridiculous. LES JUPES, they call them in Belgium.
The vowel was so modified as to be indistinct.
—What do they call them?
—LES JUPES.
—O!
Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile which he
could not see on the priest’s shadowed face, its image or
spectre only passing rapidly across his mind as the low dis-
creet accent fell upon his ear. He gazed calmly before him
at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening and of the
faint yellow glow which hid the tiny flame kindling upon
his cheek.
The names of articles of dress worn by women or of cer-
tain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making brought
always to his mind a delicate and sinful perfume. As a boy
he had imagined the reins by which horses are driven as
slender silken bands and it shocked him to feel at Strad-
brooke the greasy leather of harness. It had shocked him,
too, when he had felt for the first time beneath his tremu-
lous fingers the brittle texture of a woman’s stocking for,
retaining nothing of all he read save that which seemed to
him an echo or a prophecy of his own state, it was only amid
soft-worded phrases or within rose-soft stuffs that he dared
to conceive of the soul or body of a woman moving with

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