n, now was aware of
the poetic fitness of the story--the proud boy who sooner than live with
dishonour had left home and friends to face the wide world and roam, a
veritable Ishmael. Adventure began to call to him; the salt on his lips
as he licked them seemed its very tang. He was big and strong, and had
no fear of hard living; neither was he fearful physically. On one thing
he was determined--not to stay to be expelled and then be taken
ignominiously back to Cloom and the jeers of his family.

But deep down in him his ineradicable honesty kept nagging at him,
telling that this new sea-lure was all make-believe, that not that way
for him did happiness lie. Yet he kept on, always with a tingle of
excitement mingling with an undercurrent of disbelief in the reality of
it all, and made his way to the quayside determined to talk to the
sailors and introduce the subject of a new hand.... Half an hour later
he came away, after a desultory though interesting enough conversation
in which his project had never got past his tongue. Through no cowardice
or dread, he had simply not been able to broach it. He stared back at
the ship when he paused on the crest of the hill, trying to puzzle out
what was struggling for recognition in him. Dimly it began to dawn on
him that there are only two ways for a man to live fully. The first is
by being rooted to a spot that is everything to him, by which he makes
his bread, by which and on which he lives, so that its well-being is as
that of himself; and the second is by calling no place home, wandering
the world over and remaining always free. The way which lies betwixt
these two--that of hiring this house or that, putting belongings about
it and being attached to it by purely artificial ties of expediency and
rent, a house that was born of the thought of some unknown, the fabric
of whose ground is nothing to him who hires it--this way, which is the
way of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, is false and
unsatisfying. It would be splendid to have two lives and give one to
each of the primary ways, to live once by the soil and once by the sea;
but that is a thing that can happen to no man. He may wander till he is
ageing and then "settle down," but that is a different affair. Ishmael
was born of the soil; Cloom, not only by inheritance, but by his
peculiar training, meant his life. With a sensation of something
clogging, but infinitely satisfying too, he admitted it. Cloom had b