Page 750 - ULYSSES
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Ulysses
ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I
must acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, clapping on the
table so as to evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old
Glory Allelujurum was round again today, an elderly man
with dundrearies, preferring through his nose a request to
have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I bade
him hold himself in readiness for that the event would
burst anon. ‘Slife, I’ll be round with you. I cannot but
extol the virile potency of the old bucko that could still
knock another child out of her. All fell to praising of it,
each after his own fashion, though the same young blade
held with his former view that another than her conjugial
had been the man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy
(virtuous) or an itinerant vendor of articles needed in
every household. Singular, communed the guest with
himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of
metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal
dormitory and the dissecting theatre should be the
seminaries of such frivolity, that the mere acquisition of
academic titles should suffice to transform in a pinch of
time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of
an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed
the noblest. But, he further added, it is mayhap to relieve
the pentup feelings that in common oppress them for I
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