Morning Rituals and Domestic Life — Ulysses

Mr Leopold Bloom moves about the kitchen with a kidney on his mind, the inner organ he likes above the rest. The cat stalks a table leg until he pours warm milk and watches the rough tongue finish it. Her breakfast things go on the humpy tray. Thursday is no day for mutton at Buckley's, so the kidney will have to be pork, and he goes out into the morning with that errand and with poor Dignam already in the back of the walk. At Dlugacz's the last kidney oozes on a willowpatterned dish. A girl from next door calls items from a slip. Bloom rests his eyes on the swing of her skirt and holds a cut sheet from the pile, a model farm on the lakeshore of Tiberias, while the butcher snips and wraps. He buys the meat. Hunger, at least, is an appetite he can meet himself.

Two letters and a card are on the hall floor. He stoops for them. One is from Milly in Mullingar. One, in a bold hand, is addressed to Mrs Marion Bloom. He carries the tray up, thumb in the teapot handle, and sets it by the bed. She has the new tam, the picnic, the student, and she wants the blind and the pot scalded. Who was the letter from? Boylan, she says. He is bringing the programme. She will sing Là ci darem and Love's Old Sweet Song. What time is the funeral? Eleven, he thinks. Letting the blind up, he sees her glance at the letter and tuck it under the pillow. He does not ask for it. Downstairs she has also left him a word he has to explain, metempsychosis, the change of a soul, which she hears as met him pike hoses. He says it again in plainer words. The word sits in the kitchen with the letter he was not shown.

The kidney spatters and blackens while he slits Milly's letter. A new tam, a picnic at the lough, a young student, Boylan's seaside girls, and she was fifteen yesterday, the first birthday away from home. He reads it twice. She knows how to mind herself. But if not. The same qualm runs from those slim legs to the woman upstairs, whom he pictures over Boylan's letter, and he knows he cannot prevent what is coming. Better where Milly is, away. He eats what he has cooked. The cat gets the bloodsmeared paper. In the jakes he opens a prize titbit, Matcham's Masterstroke, and sits with it until the story and the morning are both used up. He pulls the shaky door and comes out into the bright air, lighter, already checking the knees of his trousers. A creak and a dark whirr rise. The bells of George's church toll. Quarter to. The private morning is finished, and the funeral is not. Poor Dignam!