Page 753 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant,
acid and inoperative.
The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling
the ceremonial usage of the Sublime Porte by the second

female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in
residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation
that an heir had been born, When he had betaken himself
to the women’s apartment to assist at the prescribed
ceremony of the afterbirth in the presence of the secretary
of state for domestic affairs and the members of the privy
council, silent in unanimous exhaustion and approbation
the delegates, chafing under the length and solemnity of
their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would
palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail
and obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once
into a strife of tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser
Bloom was heard endeavouring to urge, to mollify, to
refrain. The moment was too propitious for the display of
that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union
among tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation
was successively eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of
uterine brothers, the Caesarean section, posthumity with
respect to the father and, that rarer form, with respect to
the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs

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