"Ourselves, oursouls alone."

(623.3-625.8)  A quick note on the title of this post:  Throughout the Wake, Joyce makes frequent reference to (and parody of) the slogan of Sinn Féin (and the movement), which is popularly translated as "Ourselves Alone" (but perhaps is more accurately translated as just "Ourselves").  It's used in a variety of contexts, but I particularly like this one, which applies it in a way that illustrates the depth and us-against-the-world nature of the marriage of HCE and ALP:  "Ourselves, oursouls alone."

Today's reading continues in the same tone and manner as the previous two.  Thinking about what she and HCE could do today, ALP imagines that they could go to Howth Castle (where the book begins!) to see the king, or "the Old Lord."  He has been well-received by the Earwickers before, so he's likely to greet them warmly.  She tells the still-sleeping HCE that if he behaves himself and if ALP is successful in her role as a polite Prankquean, the king might "knight you an Armor elsor daub you the first cheap magyerstrape."  But she recognizes that these are "[p]lain fancies" from a brain "full of sillymottocraft."  "Aloof is anoof," she says.  "We can take or leave."

Instead, the two can go to the coast and wait for ALP's letter (now stuffed in a bottle and cast into the water) to arrive ashore.  This thought prompts her to remember her youthful days, before she met HCE, when she wrote this version of the letter and dreamed of meeting the man of her dreams (the "mains of me draims").  She wrote about these hopes in the letter, but "buried the page" when she met HCE.  Now, she is merely content as they "cohabit respectable."  She kind of gives HCE a hard time, telling him to complete the Tower of Babel that this master-builder has always said he'd complete.  "Tilltop, bigmaster!" she teases.  "Scale the summit!  You're not so giddy any more.  All your graundplotting and the little it brought!"  She's made a home on this "limpidy marge" in Chapelizod.  "Park and a pub for me," she says, summing up her life.

She then goes back to the days of their courtship.  "You will always call me Leafiest, won't you, dowling?" she remembers telling HCE, her "Wordherfhull Ohldhbhoy!"  He may come from dubious origins (she herself doesn't seem entirely sure of his past), but she tells him that "you done me fine!"  After all, he's "[t]he only man was ever known could eat the crushts of lobsters."