Page 1064 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

ink, lord Bellew was it, as he might very easily have
picked up the details from some pal on board ship and
then, when got up to tally with the description given,
introduce himself with: Excuse me, my name is So and So or

some such commonplace remark. A more prudent course,
as Bloom said to the not over effusive, in fact like the
distinguished personage under discussion beside him,
would have been to sound the lie of the land first.
—That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the
shebeen proprietor commented. She put the first nail in
his coffin.
—Fine lump of a woman all the same, the soi-disant
townclerk Henry Campbell remarked, and plenty of her.
She loosened many a man’s thighs. I seen her picture in a
barber’s. The husband was a captain or an officer.
—Ay, Skin-the-Goat amusingly added, he was and a
cottonball one.
This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character
occasioned a fair amount of laughter among his entourage.
As regards Bloom he, without the faintest suspicion of a
smile, merely gazed in the direction of the door and
reflected upon the historic story which had aroused
extraordinary interest at the time when the facts, to make
matters worse, were made public with the usual

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