Aeolus: A Newsroom Full of Wind.

Bloom had previously lent money to Joe Hynes but is far too polite to press him for repayment, even when the chance arrives.

Bloom watched him stride off… Now if he got paid he'd come round. Three weeks. Will he? He can't.

SignificanceHynes passes the cashier's window with money owed to Bloom in his pocket, yet Bloom cannot bring himself to ask. His financial caution and inability to assert himself collide: generosity, once again, brings him no reward. It is one of Bloom's quiet, recurring personal defeats.

Bloom comes to the office hoping to secure favourable placement for Alexander Keyes' advertisement — the day's one piece of real business.

—He wants it in for two months, Mr Bloom said… —Tell him he can kiss my arse, Myles Crawford said.

SignificanceDespite careful planning — the crossed-keys design, the renewal, the trip to the National Library for the motif — interruptions, mood and office politics defeat him. When Bloom leaves, the task is still unfinished. His patient practicality is no match for the journalists' verbosity.

Stephen faithfully delivers Mr Deasy's earnest letter on foot-and-mouth disease, discharging the errand begun in Nestor.

—Now he wants to write to the papers about it… We can do that, Myles Crawford said. Where is it? … I see, the editor said.

SignificanceCrawford skims and mocks the letter rather than embracing it; publication looks unlikely. Stephen's dutiful idealism meets the editor's cynicism, and journalism reveals itself as performance rather than public service.

J. J. O'Molloy, once a rising lawyer, quietly tries to ask Myles Crawford for financial help.

—Well? he said. — … J. J. O'Molloy… —Is the editor to be seen? he asked… A telephone rang rudely.

SignificanceHis request goes nowhere — interrupted, deflected, never quite spoken aloud. The scene dramatises his fall from professional success into dependency, and shows Joyce's recurring fascination with genteel decline.

Bloom only later thinks of the cutting thing he should have said to John Henry Menton — a textbook case of esprit de l'escalier.

Could you tell me that I was thinking of… No. I should have said something about an old hat or something. No.

SignificanceBloom's insecurity and social awkwardness surface in the gap between thought and speech. The belated retort is one of Joyce's most psychologically realistic observations — interior consciousness running a beat behind the social world.

O'Molloy is repeatedly described as a man of remarkable gifts who has failed to fulfil them.

J. J. O'Molloy's white careworn face… Cleverest fellow at the junior bar he used to be. Decline, poor chap.

SignificanceDrink, bad fortune and squandered ability have hollowed out a brilliant career. His unrealised potential is one of the novel's recurring themes — the gap between promise and achievement that shadows nearly everyone in the office.

Beneath the bustle, the Freeman's Journal is an institution under commercial pressure, its circulation slipping.

—We were never loved but by foreigners… Lost in the abstruse… the smell of old printing-houses, dust and decay.

SignificanceCompetition, a changing readership and commercial pressure erode the paper even as its men declaim immortal speeches. The institutional setback rhymes with the personal failures unfolding inside it.

The chapter's talk circles the 1882 Phoenix Park murders, carried out by the Invincibles, which damaged the constitutional nationalist cause.

—The Invincibles, he said, the new Messiah for Ireland! … Skin-the-Goat… drove the car for the getaway.

SignificanceCombined later with the Parnell split, the murders delayed Irish Home Rule for decades. The episode turns on unintended consequences and historical irony: rhetoric and violence both circulate, yet neither delivers the nation home.