From Beresford Place they walk to 7 Eccles Street, Bloom and Stephen, along Gardiner Street and the west side of Mountjoy Square, slower as they go, with halts, until they cross in front of Saint George's and come to the steps. They have talked of music, Ireland, women, the Church, and why Stephen fell. Bloom finds a few likenesses. Both prefer music to pictures, and both disbelieve a good deal of what they were taught. They split on the rest. Stephen will not take Bloom's faith in diet and self-help. Bloom will not take Stephen's faith in an eternal affirmation of the spirit in literature. The one point they share is a negative one. Gaslight does nothing to the trees. At the door Bloom feels for his latchkey. It is in the trousers he wore the day before yesterday. He had told himself twice not to forget. He forgot. He does not knock. He climbs the area railings, drops to the flags, and is shaken, not hurt. He lets himself through the scullery, lights the gas and a candle, takes off his boots, and opens the hall door. Stephen, who has watched the flame move behind the kitchen panes, comes in softly, helps chain the door, and follows him down.
In the kitchen a line by the fire holds handkerchiefs and a pair of women's grey stockings. Bloom fills the kettle. The water runs, and he follows it in his mind back to Roundwood reservoir in Wicklow, then washes his hands with the lemon soap he bought that morning and has not paid for. He offers Stephen a wash. Stephen refuses. He hates cold water, and his last bath was in October of the year before. Bloom has advice about bathing and about bacon, and he keeps it to himself. He makes Epps's cocoa as the label says, two spoons in each cup. Milly's moustache cup he sets aside. The cream kept for Marion's breakfast he gives to Stephen, and a smaller share to himself. They drink. Bloom reckons their ages and the two times they have met before. Once, in 1887, in the lilac garden at Matthew Dillon's, Stephen five years old and unwilling to give his hand, his mother beside him. Once, on a wet Sunday in 1892, in Breslin's hotel, with Stephen's father. Bloom was asked to dinner and declined. A third link is Mrs Riordan, Stephen's Dante, who later lived at the City Arms and talked to Bloom when he was a clerk at the cattle market. He used to push her chair. On the blank page of Sweets of Sin they set Irish letters beside Hebrew ones. Bloom begins a Hebrew anthem and stops after two lines, because he cannot remember the rest. He patches the sense in other words. Then he asks Stephen to sing, here where no one will hear. Stephen sings the ballad of little Harry Hughes, whose ball broke a Jew's window, and of the Jew's daughter who led him in and cut off his head. Bloom smiles at the first part. The kitchen window is unbroken. The second part he receives as a father, and he stays still.
He offers the room above the kitchen, next to the room where he and Molly sleep, for what is left of the night. A bed, quiet, a place to study. He thinks a stay might wake his own mind, and might give Molly correct Italian and wear out what has hold of her. Stephen says no at once, gratefully, and will not be persuaded. Bloom gives back the one pound seven shillings he has been holding since the brothel. They try other bargains, and the bargains will not sit together. Italian lessons where the pupil lives. Singing lessons where the teacher lives. Further talks at the Ship, at the library, at the hospital in Holles Street, or halfway between their two addresses. None of it is fixed. A clown at a circus once told a crowd that Bloom was his father. A florin Bloom notched and spent in 1898 never came back. He does not expect these new plans to return either. They go into the garden. Side by side they urinate, looking up. A star falls from Vega towards the sign of Leo. Bloom unlocks the door from inside. On the threshold their hands meet, and the bells of Saint George strike the hour. Stephen hears the Latin that was sung for his mother. Bloom hears only heigho. Stephen goes out. Bloom stays.
Alone, he undresses, and the night widens into a house he does not own, a gentleman's place he calls Flowerville, which he cannot pay for and which answers nothing he is afraid of. The drawers bring him back. Papers, testimonials, and then his father: Rudolph telling a boy of six the family wanderings, from Szombathely through Vienna and London to Dublin, a map on the table, the advice to mind the pence. At the end of that memory is the father's face, dead, a suicide by poison. Bloom feels a remorse for the old practices he once shrugged off. They do not seem more reasonable now. They seem no less reasonable than what replaced them. He thinks of disappearing, a notice, a reward for a man strayed from Eccles Street, and he does not go. He gets into the bed. The linen is not fresh. He finds her smell, the imprint of a man's body that is not his, crumbs, and flakes of potted meat, which he picks away. Every man who climbs into this bed thinks he is the first, and is only the latest. Bloom sets them in a line, from Lieutenant Mulvey through Bartell d'Arcy, Menton, Dollard, Simon Dedalus, Lenehan, a farmer at the Horse Show, a bootblack at the post office, and on to Hugh Boylan, called Blazes, the last, a bounder and a boaster. Envy comes, then jealousy, then abnegation, then a tired equanimity. He will not kill, or duel, or divorce tonight. He kisses her rump, a long kiss, and lies back. She wakes enough to know him and to ask. He answers with a cut version of the day. He leaves out the letter to Martha, the row in the pub, and the girl on the strand. He puts in the theatre, a book, Stephen Dedalus knocked down and recovered, and his own drop over the railings, told as a small feat. They lie opposed, she one way, he the other, a hand on the bridge of his nose. The questions have been answered. Stephen is gone, and Molly is not.
