V2nd - alice may well be right...

[Michael Bailey]

...that is, Godolphin flees V. and what she conceives of as help for
him, in favor of rolling on the river with Huck, er, Mantissa!
Hyman's thesis is preserved, just as, mutatis mutandis, Lucille's
hymen was preserved, leaving Benny free to roam with Stencil.  (Feel
free to groan, that *was* pretty terrible...)

But V. just doesn't get it!  She thinks he's worried about emissaries
from Vheissu tailing him in the public houses, when in actuality he's
more worried about HM Victoria's emissaries tailing him...

Her acquisition of property has made her conservative...

...yet it's not quite so simple, is it really?  It's really quite a
complex scenario.
My mind is boggling at all the data points.
a) Eigenvalue as member of the same Circle as Clayton Chiclitz,
defense contractor
b) Eigenvalue qua dentist as replacing psychiatrist in a modern
permutation of a confessor role
c) Godolphin confessing in a church setting to V., but we don't know
if he's C of E or Catholic, do we?
d) loyalty to the idea of Empire, on the part of Stencil, old Hugh
Godolphin and young V.
e) adherence to an idea of freedom on the part of young Evan G.,
Mantissa, the Gaucho
f) the personification of paintings (especially by Mantissa, likening
the Birth of Venus to his former seamstress mistress and the dreams
she spoke of to him, but also by the Decadents and other
"deracinated seers" in viewing Europe as "a gallery one is familiar
with but long weary of) ) - similar to the notion advanced in Chapter
3 regarding how many of the inhabitants of Baedeker Land are in fact
not alive and how men like Goodfellow and Bongo-Shaftsbury need to
occasionally act if only to prove themselves different from statues...

-- 
"I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard your voice
singing through the gloom" - James Joyce