He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.
Just then his aunts and his wife came out of the ladies’ dressing-room. His aunts were two small, plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face.
Significantly Joyce positions his protagonist Gabriel at a threshold. One way of being is at the gateway to another. And we have all stood at the threshold of some social event and hesitated before entering? This allows the filtered impressions to oscillate between the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider” perspective. It adds to the complexity of the moment as it reveals the contradictory nature of Gabriel’s self-perception.
His role as witness is explorede through a strongly expressed auditory and visual series of viewpoints, many of which are also linked to kinaesthetic impressions. This elision between on impression and another highlights the heightened ‘sensitivity’ of Gabriel in this situation as he awaits the time for the delivery of his speech. It also reveals his overriding concern with HOW he LOOKS to others so that many of the senses lead back to the visual emphasising both his feelings of superiority and inferiority. This tension between one form of perception and another convinces the reader of the authentcity of gabriel’s complex being/identity.