whose least gesture seemed to spring
from an indefinite fulness of life, the two women in front, a kind of
lustrous tableau of what it was possible to choose and to enjoy. They
were grouped and shut off in a high light which seemed to proceed partly
from the usual sources and partly from their own personalities; he saw
them in a way which underlined their significance at every point. It
seemed to Stephen that in a manner he profaned this temple of what he
held to be poorest and cheapest in life, a paradox of which he was but
dimly aware in his dejection. A sharp impression of his physical
inferiority to the other men assailed him; his appreciation of their
muscular shoulders had a rasp in it. For once the poverty of spirit to
which he held failed to offer him a refuge. His eye wandered restlessly
as if attempting futile reconciliations, and the thing most present with
him was the worn-all-day feeling about the neck of his cassock. He fixed
his attention presently in a climax of passive discomfort on the
curtain, where, unconsciously, his gaze crept with a subtle
interrogation in it to the wide eyeballs of the Sphinx.

The stalls gradually filled, although it was a second production in the
middle of the week, and although the gallery and rupee seats under it
were nearly empty. The piece accounted for both. When Duff Lindsay said
at dinner that it wasn't "up to much," he spoke, I fancy, from the
nearest point of view he could take to that of the Order of St.
Barnabas. As a matter of fact, _The Victim of Virtue_ was up to a very
great deal, but its points were so delicate that one must have been
educated rather broadly to grasp them, which is again, perhaps, a
foolish contrariety of terms. At all events, they carried no appeal to
the theatre-goers from the sailing ships in the river or the regiments
in the fort, who turned as one man that night to Jimmy Finnigan.

Stephen was aware, in the abstract, of what he might expect. He savoured
the enterprises of the London theatres weekly in the _Saturday Review_;
he had cast a remotely observing eye upon the productions of this
particular playwright through that medium for a long time. They formed a
manifestation of the outer world fit enough to draw a glance of
speculation from the inner; their author was an acrobat of ideas.
Doubtless we are all clowns in the eyes of the angels, yet we have the
habit of supposing that they sometimes look down upon us. It was thus,
if the paral