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— Your wants and the manner in which you satisfy them,



— Exactly.



— And what are your wants?



— Air and food.



— Have you any subsidiary ones?



— The acquisition of knowledge.



— And you need also religious comforts?



— Maybe so... at times.



— And women... at times?



— Never!



This last word was uttered with a moral snap of the jaws and in such a business-like tone of voice that Stephen burst out into a fit of loud laughter. As for the fact, though he was very suspicious in this matter, Stephen was inclined to believe in McCann's chastity and much as he disliked it he chose to contemplate it rather than the contrary phenomenon. He almost trembled to think of that unhorizoned doggedness working its way backwards.



McCann's insistence on a righteous life and his condemnation of licence as a sin against the future both annoyed and stung Stephen. It annoyed him because it savoured so strongly of paterfamilias and it stung him because it seemed to judge him incapable of that part. In McCann's mouth he considered it unjust and unnatural and he fell back on a sentence of Bacon's. The care of posterity, he quoted, is greatest in them that have no posterity: and for the rest he said that he could not understand what right the future had to hinder him from any passionate exertions in the present.



— That is not the teaching of Ibsen, said McCann.



— Teaching! cried Stephen.



— The moral of Ghosts is just the opposite of what you say.



— Bah! You regard a play as a scientific document.



— Ghosts teaches self-repression.



— O Jesus! said Stephen in agony.



— This is my lodging, said McCann, halting at the gate. I must go in.



— You have connected Ibsen and Eno's fruit salt forever in my mind, said Stephen.

— Daedalus, said the Auditor crisply, you are a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.





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