Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the son.

Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.

That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.

John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.

If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare’s later years which Renan admired so much breathe another spirit.

The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.

There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering.