"we come down home gently on our own turnedabout asses"

(162.21-164.14)  The story of Burrus and Caseous resumes with Shaun contrasting the two.  Caseous fancies himself as a "caviller" (both cavalier and objector), while Burrus is a more conservative defender of the faith.  Brutus, Shaun says, comes from a "cleanly line" and was a wholesome, model boy as a youth.  Caseous, on the other hand, is described as a stinking, highjinking, priggish worm.

From these descriptions, Shaun returns to a theme of the Wake.  We must learn to accept (and eventually embrace) contraries:

Thus we cannot escape our likes and mislikes, exiles or ambusheers, beggar and neighbour and -- this is where the dimeshow advertisers advance the temporal relief plea -- let us be tolerant of antipathies.

But while Shaun recognizes the inevitability of antipathies and the need to be tolerant of them, he isn't ready to fully embrace the philosophies of the likes of Nicholas de Cusa and Giordano Bruno.  But neither is he ready to take the easy way out and let a modern machine (here the "Silkebjorg tyrondynamon machine for the more economical helixtrolysis of these amboadipates") synthesize the likes of Burrus and Caseous for him.

Burrus and Caseous are incompatible, coming from separate poles.  But, "looking wantingly around our undistributed middle between males," we recognize the need for a female.  Just as Nuvoletta attempted to serve as the force that unified the Mookse and the Gripes, a woman arrives on the scene to reconcile the differences between Burrus and Caseous.  Here, at the end of today's reading, we are introduced to Margareen, a "cowrymaid . . . whom we shall often meet below."  We will see how effective a unifier Margareen is tomorrow.