False lull.  Something quite ordinary.

Messenger took out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar.

I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives.

    A polished period

J. J. O’Molloy resumed, moulding his words: 

—­He said of it:  That stony effigy in frozen music, horned and terrible,
of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and of prophecy
which, if aught that the imagination or the hand of sculptor has wrought
in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live,
deserves to live.

His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall.

—­Fine!  Myles Crawford said at once.

—­The divine afflatus, Mr O’Madden Burke said.

—­You like it?  J. J. O’Molloy asked Stephen.

Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed.  He took a cigarette from the case.  J. J. O’Molloy offered his case to Myles Crawford.  Lenehan lit their cigarettes as before and took his trophy, saying: 

—­Muchibus thankibus.

    A man of high morale

—­Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O’Molloy said to Stephen.  What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal hush poets:  A. E. the mastermystic?  That Blavatsky woman started it.  She was a nice old bag of tricks.  A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer that you came to him in the small hours of the morning to ask him about planes of consciousness.  Magennis thinks you must have been pulling A. E.’s leg.  He is a man of the very highest morale, Magennis.

Speaking about me.  What did he say?  What did he say?  What did he say about me?  Don’t ask.

—­No, thanks, professor MacHugh said, waving the cigarettecase aside.  Wait a moment.  Let me say one thing.  The finest display of oratory I ever heard was a speech made by John F Taylor at the college historical society.  Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had spoken and the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days), advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.

He turned towards Myles Crawford and said: 

—­You know Gerald Fitzgibbon.  Then you can imagine the style of his discourse.

—­He is sitting with Tim Healy, J. J. O’Molloy said, rumour has it, on the Trinity college estates commission.

—­He is sitting with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford said, in a child’s frock.  Go on.  Well?