"The same renew."

(225.15-227.18)  Well, it's possible I am getting the hang of this chapter, because today's reading did, in fact, go more smoothly than the past few days' passages.  And what an entertaining and masterful passage it is.

We begin with a lamenting of Glugg's sorry state.  "What she meaned he could not can," the narrator says.  Switching to the present tense, the narrator goes on to suggest that things would turn out better for Glugg if only he would talk instead of gawk and stop worrying so much (recalling the sins of HCE, the nervous, stuttering, voyeuristic father).  Glugg finally gives three guesses -- "monbreamstone," "Hellfeuersteyn," and "Van Diemen's coral pearl" -- but none of them are the correct answer to the riddle.  Unfortunately for Glugg, "He has lost."

The Floras celebrate Glugg's defeat by sending him away and forming a ring around Chuff.  Izod is in tears, though, for "[s]he's promised he'd eye her."  She "sits a glooming so gleaming in the gloaming," and the narrator asks us to "[b]e good enough to symperise."  Izod would go anywhere to join Glugg.  "If it's to nowhere she's going to too," the narrator adds.  But, this being the Wake, Izod won't stay in tears forever, for "we know how Day the Dyer works."  Once this day has passed, "among the shades that Eve's now wearing she'll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow."  Chuff will replace Glugg as the object of Izod's fancy, and become her fiancé.

As Izod sits weeping, the Floras dance around Chuff.  This begins a fascinating passage.  The Floras are identified by color in words that represent the seven colors of the rainbow and spell out "R-A-Y-N-B-O-W."  They are now "all but merely a schoolgirl," but as they perform their dance through oodles of years and endless eons, we see the seven types of women they eventually become.  Some are rich, some are widowed, and some are actresses.  With this momentary scene of foreshadowing completed, we go back in time to the present as they are identified by name in a pattern that spells "rainbow" in reverse:  "And these ways wend they.  And those ways went they.  Winnie, Olive and Beatrice, Nelly and Ida, Amy and Rue."  "Here they come back, all the gay pack, for they are the florals," the narrator explains.  One imagines the Floras dancing around Chuff in one direction, moving time forward, then dancing in the other direction -- coming back -- moving time back to the present.