Too early an enquiry results in forcing the greetee into a conversation, but waiting too long results in a verbal collision or in missing your target.

Scene 3: My mother had a maid call'd Barbara; / She was in love, and he she lov'd prov'd mad / And did forsake her; […]

This remarkable, Dostoyevskeyan passage (continuing to the bottom of SH 206) has no real counterpart elsewhere in Joyce. For one brief time, in this, his most anticlerical book, he takes time to state the Church’s attractions.

and dost thou, indeed, revive to existence only to again (even in more attempered blood) design the death of the innocent, helpless, orphaned memorial of a pure, a heaven and earthly-sanctioned flame, whose venial trespass was but the forestalment of your own decree?