Molly Bloom is awake in the bed, and she begins with breakfast. Bloom has asked for it in bed, a couple of eggs, and he has not asked that since the City Arms, when he put on a sick voice for Mrs Riordan. The widow left them nothing. The farthings went to masses for herself. She was afraid to spend fourpence, full of the end of the world, and down on low necks. Molly hopes she never turns into that woman. She likes, even so, the part of him that is polite to old women and to beggars. If he were really ill she would rather a hospital than her own nursing, because a nurse in the house would be next, and men when they are sick want a woman in order to get well. She comes to the letter. The day she brought in the paper with Dignam's death, he covered a page with blotting paper. Some woman, she decides, who thinks she has a softy in a man near forty. Kissing her bottom was his way of hiding it. She remembers the servant Mary at Ontario Terrace, the padded false bottom, the long hair on his coat, the oysters, the garters in the girl's room. She gave the girl notice. She could not touch him if that was who he had been with. Under the servant and the letter is Boylan. Walking by the Tolka he squeezed her hand, and she pressed back, singing, while Bloom said he was dining out and going to the Gaiety. Bloom is not such a fool. He has an idea. Boylan is at least a change. Then the afternoon is simply the afternoon. Port, potted meat with a salty taste, her clothes off, the blinds down, the size of him, and her making him pull out. She slept at once. Thunder woke her. She blessed herself and said a Hail Mary, as she used to under the thunder on Gibraltar, and she thought of the candle she had lit in Whitefriars Street for the month of May. Bloom would scoff. He says there is no soul, only grey matter.
He will be in Ennis on the twenty-seventh for his father's anniversary. She is to go to Belfast with Boylan. Rooms side by side would give them away, because you can fool a husband and you cannot fool a lover, not after she has told Boylan that she and Bloom never do anything. Bloom spills into the plan, as he always does. There was the day he walked a platform with soup for the two of them and would not pay until he had finished it, the train ready to leave, the door got open with his knife. There was Lieutenant Gardner, dead of fever in the war, who kissed her goodbye at the canal lock and called her his Irish beauty. She loves a regiment going past. The first time she saw the Spanish cavalry, the lights of the rock like fireflies across the bay, she was a girl in Gibraltar. What Boylan has bought her out of the cheque is small. Garters, a lotion she has used up, a few handkerchiefs. She will be thirty-three in September, and she knows what happens to a woman's looks, and what women do to you when they see you have no clothes and no man. The rock comes back as heat and bugs and guns on the Queen's birthday, her father and Captain Groves drinking and sending her out of the room, and letters she posted to herself because nobody wrote. Hester kissed her goodbye and left. It went dull. This morning's post is Milly's card. Mulvey was the first.
She finds him on the hill. She is not sure of the name for a moment, Jack or Joe or Harry, and then it is Harry Mulvey, a lieutenant off the Calypso, fair, a laughing voice, his cap always crooked. She tormented him, got over him, unbuttoned him, and would not let him inside her petticoat. She pulled him off into her handkerchief and pretended she was not excited. He called her Molly darling and said he would come back. She promised that if she were married she would let him. She burst a paper bag to send the birds up. They walked back by the guardhouse and the burial place, where she pretended to read the Hebrew. Long before the name was hers she used to write Bloom on a card to see how it looked. The girl on the hill keeps being interrupted by the woman in the bed. She gets up to the chamberpot and thinks of Bloom's letters, her body underlined, a sentence taken from a book. The first night they stared at each other as if they had already met. Now he is asleep at the foot of the bed, a hand on his nose, like the yellow god he showed her in the museum. Sixteen years, and the houses they have left, one after another, him whistling and helping with the furniture and then losing the job. She thinks of his friends, of Dignam's widow and five children, of Ben Dollard squeezed into a borrowed coat, of Simon Dedalus singing the wrong verse first. Simon's son, Bloom says, is an author and is to be a professor of Italian, and she is to take lessons. What is he driving at, showing the young man her photograph? She looks young in it. She wonders he did not give the picture away, and her with it.
She knows how the morning can be managed. If Bloom wants the truth of Boylan she can tell it so that he gives her money for underclothes, or she can wipe him off like a business and leave him looking at the ceiling. The angelus is not far. She tries to count herself to sleep and comes instead to flowers. If he brings the young man home she wants roses in the house. She will send to Lambe's. She will clean the piano keys with milk, wear a white rose or a red one, and accompany him. The plan opens into fields and cattle and the sea, and into her scorn for men who say there is no God and then send for a priest when they are dying. The sun shines for you, Bloom said, the day they lay among the rhododendrons on Howth. Grey tweed, a straw hat, a leap year, sixteen years ago. She put the seedcake into his mouth from hers. After the kiss she nearly lost her breath. He said she was a flower of the mountain. That was one true thing he said, and it was why she liked him. She saw that he felt what a woman is, and she knew she could get round him. She led him on until he asked her to say yes, and she did not answer first. She looked at the sea and thought of Mulvey, of Hester, of her father, of the Spanish girls and the Moors and the night they missed the boat at Algeciras, of the fig trees in the Alameda and Gibraltar when she was a girl. He kissed her under the Moorish wall. She thought, as well him as another, and then she asked him with her eyes to ask again. He asked her would she say yes, and she drew him down so he could feel her breasts, his heart going like mad, and yes she said yes she will Yes.
