he and I came within recognizing distance on the street or in
the National Library, but we had no communication. Joyce
was aloof, and his blue eyes, perhaps because of defective
vision, seemed intolerant of approach. He would enter the
rotunda of the reading room at the library generally between
eight and nine o'clock in the evening. I won't say that he
entered arrogantly, but he entered as one who was going to
hold himself aloof from the collectivity there. I was not in-
terested in what he was reading, but once when I came to the
counter after he had been there, an attendant said of a book
that had been put aside, apparently to be reserved, "For Mr.
Joyce." It was a book on heraldry.

The time came when I did make an advance to Joyce, how-
ever: the gesture was prompted by his transitory presence in
a circle I belonged to.

The patron of the younger poets-- one might say the pro-
moter of poetry--in the Dublin of that day was "AE," George
William Russell. Poet, painter, theosophist, and man of great
heart, AE had gathered a group 'round him that met at his
house on Sunday evenings to discuss recently published or
about-to-be published work and to adumbrate the shape of
the coming Irish literature. He had already collected and
brought to publication poems of certain poets in their twenties,
of whom I was one. (Looked back on, this seems an act of
practical benevolence.) Well, I was told that Joyce--not, of
course, as one of the group--had gone, manuscript in hand, to
AE's house, and there had been a colloquy. The encounter,

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