"I could lead you there and I still by you in bed."

(621.8-623.3)  "It is the softest morning that ever I can ever remember me," says ALP as her final monologue resumes in today's reading.  Her speech proceeds in the same relaxed, meandering tone that it began with in the previous two pages.  This is beautiful prose, and it's shaping up to be a fitting ending for the Wake (a book for which I had been thinking it might be impossible to write a good ending).

The rain for the day will not begin, ALP says, until the proper time has come.  She looks forward to breakfast ("The trout will be so fine at brookfisht.") just as she imagines how well the fish will be doing at a certain point in the river.  She has a list of things for HCE to take care of in this new day (for instance, he has to buy her a new girdle when he goes to the market).  For now, though, she's content to let him sleep beside her in bed (where she notably reaches down for a moment to grab his penis).  "One time you told you'd been burnt in ice," she remembers as she thinks about the trials HCE has endured, including a Tim Finnegan-esque fall from a ladder.  "And one time it was chemicalled after you taking a lifeness.  Maybe that's why you hold your hodd as if.  And people thinks you missed the scaffold.  Of fell design."  Despite his scars, ALP still remembers HCE as a young man, and she treasures the youth that remains in him, or at least exists in the past.  "I'll close me eyes," she says.  "So not to see.  Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed.  The child we all love to place our hope in forever."  She chooses to focus on these good moments of HCE's life, rather than the bad, for, as she says, "All men has done something."

As she imagines taking a morning walk with her husband, ALP can see the birds wishing HCE "sweet good luck."  She believes that in the next election, HCE will be redeemed ("elicted") and that his enemies will "never reduce me."  Going back to the thought of the walk ("A gentle motion all around.  As leisure paces."), she recalls previous times of happiness from before the previous dark night/era of their lives.  "It seems so long since, ages since," she says.  "As if you had been long far away.  Afartodays, afeartonights, and me as with you in thadark."  But even as they rest in bed, she will return him to those good times, at least until the enemies come attacking again, pursuing HCE, as they did once before, like a fox in a fox hunt with "his three poach dogs" (the three soldiers) "aleashing him."  But ALP concludes today's reading by noting that HCE "came safe through" that attack, and she implies that he will do the same again today.