Page 237 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet of
paper, the coiling and uncoiling calculations of the profes-
sor, the spectre-like symbols of force and velocity fascinated
and jaded Stephen’s mind. He had heard some say that the
old professor was an atheist freemason. O the grey dull day!
It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness through
which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting
long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and
paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a
universe ever vaster, farther and more impalpable.
—So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoi-
dal. Perhaps some of you gentlemen may be familiar with
the works of Mr W. S. Gilbert. In one of his songs he speaks
of the billiard sharp who is condemned to play:

On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls.

—He means a ball having the form of the ellipsoid of the
principal axes of which I spoke a moment ago.
Moynihan leaned down towards Stephen’s ear and mur-
mured:
—What price ellipsoidal balls! chase me, ladies, I’m in
the cavalry!
His fellow student’s rude humour ran like a gust through
the cloister of Stephen’s mind, shaking into gay life limp
priestly vestments that hung upon the walls, setting them
to sway and caper in a sabbath of misrule. The forms of the

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