"Never stop! Continuarration! You're not there yet."

(204.21-206.28)  As the eighth chapter of the Wake progresses, the two washerwomen's interactions start getting a bit more amusing and testy.  Toward the beginning of today's passage, one woman asks, among other things, why ALP was "frickled" (freckled) and whether she had wavy hair or "was it weirdly a wig she wore."  All these questions start wearing at the other woman's patience, and the two have a tenser exchange:  "O go in, go on, go an!  I mean about what you know.  I know right well what you mean.  Rother!"  This leads into a digression in which the women discuss their work, including whose garments are whose and what state the clothes are in.  For instance, one says, "That's not the vesdre benediction smell.  I can tell from here by their eau de Colo and the scent of her oder they're Mrs Magrath's.  And you ought to have aird them."

After the women shake themselves from this digression, one of them resumes the story of ALP, picking up just after HCE's fall.  Once the news got out, the woman says, even the snow that fell on HCE's hair was against him.  Everywhere -- "in cit or suburb or in addled areas" -- HCE's image was turned upside down and even the idle cornerboys mocked him.  He was in bad shape, but ALP stood by him.  As one woman says, ALP "said to herself she'd frame a plan to fake a shine, the mischiefmaker, the like of it you niever heard."

What was ALP's plan?  She obtained "a shamy mailsack" from her son, Shaun, and then "consulted her chapboucqs."  Before this washerwoman details the rest of the plan, however, the other woman begins to laugh at the story, which prompts her to ask whether her companion really wants to hear the story at all.  They then begin to bicker in an amusing passage:

O but you must, you must really!  Make my hear it gurgle gurgle, like the farest gargle gargle in the dusky dirgle dargle!  By the holy well of Mulhuddart I swear I'd pledge my chanza getting to heaven through Tirry and Killy's mount of impiety to hear it all, aviary word!  O, leave me to my faculties, woman, a while!  If you don't like my story get out of the punt.  Well, have it your way, so.  Here, sit down and do as you're bid.

The passage ends with one of the women scrubbing "the canon's underpants."  We'll accordingly have to wait until tomorrow to get more of the story of ALP's plan to avenge her husband.