She took a penknife out of her pocket
And cut off his little head,
And now he'll play his ball no more
For he lies among the dead.
How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?
With mixed feelings. Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew's daughter, all dressed in green.
Condense Stephen's commentary.
One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by inadvertence,
twice by design he challenges his destiny. It comes when he is abandoned and challenges him reluctant
and, as an apparition of hope and youth holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation, to a
secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him, consenting.
Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?
He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told.
Why was the host (reluctant, unresisting) still?
In accordance with the law of the conservation of energy.
Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?
He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the incitation of the hierarchy, the superstition
of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the
influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances
of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.
From which (if any) of these mental or physical disorders was he not totally immune?
From hypnotic suggestion: once, waking, he had not recognised his sleeping apartment: more than once,
waking, he had been for an indefinite time incapable of moving or uttering sounds. From somnambulism: once,
sleeping, his body had risen, crouched and crawled in the direction of a heatless fire and, having attained
its destination, there, curled, unheated in night attire had lain, sleeping.
Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member of his family?
Twice, in Holles street and in Ontario terrace, his daughter Millicent (Milly) at the ages of 6 and 8 years
had uttered in sleep an exclamation of terror and had replied to the interrogations of two figures in night
attire with a vacant mute expression.
What other infantile memories had he of her?
15 June 1889. A querulous newborn female infant crying to cause and lessen congestion. A child renamed
Padney Socks she shook with shocks her moneybox: counted his three free moneypenny buttons one,
tloo, tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away: blond, born of two dark, she had blond ancestry, remote,
a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau, Austrian army, proximate, a hallucination, lieutenant Mulvey, British
navy.
What endemic characteristics were present?
Conversely the nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct line of lineage which, though interrupted,
would continue at distant intervals to its most distant intervals.
What memories had he of her adolescence?