reet I really think it would be better to do away with it,
don't you?

--It must be troublesome, I imagine.

--Of course it is, of course. Just imagine when I was in Belgium I
used to see them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this thing up
about their knees! It was really ridiculous. LES JUPES, they call them
in Belgium.

The vowel was so modified as to be indistinct.

--What do they call them?

--LES JUPES.

--O!

Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile which he could not see on
the priest's shadowed face, its image or spectre only passing rapidly
across his mind as the low discreet accent fell upon his ear. He gazed
calmly before him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening
and of the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny flame kindling upon his
cheek.

The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and
delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a
delicate and sinful perfume. As a boy he had imagined the reins by
which horses are driven as slender silken bands and it shocked him to
feel at Stradbrooke the greasy leather of harness. It had shocked him,
too, when he had felt for the first time beneath his tremulous fingers
the brittle texture of a woman's stocking for, retaining nothing of all
he read save that which seemed to him an echo or a prophecy of his own
state, it was only amid soft-worded phrases or within rose-soft stuffs
that he dared to conceive of the soul or body of a woman moving with
tender life.

But the phrase on the priest's lips was disingenuous for he knew that a
priest should not speak lightly on that theme. The phrase had been
spoken lightly with design and he felt that his face was being searched
by the eyes in the shadow. Whatever he had heard or read of the craft
of jesuits he had put aside frankly as not borne out by his own
experience. His masters, even when they had not attracted him,
had seemed to him always intelligent and serious priests,
athletic and high-spirited prefects. He thought of them as men
who washed their bodies briskly with cold water and wore clean cold
linen. During all the years he had lived among them in Clongowes and in
Belvedere he had received only two pandies and, though these had been
dealt him in the wrong, he knew that he had often escaped punishment.
During all those years he had never heard from any of his masters a
flippant word: it was they who had taught him christian doctrine and
urged