Joyce questioned Richard's reluctance to publish by asking: "Is it the small gold coin in the former story or the code of honour which the two gallants live by which shocks him?

A rendezvous has been arranged between the woman and Corley, during which Lenehan wanders around Dublin before stopping at a refreshment house for a supper of peas and a bottle of ginger beer.

During his solitude, Lenehan contemplates his current state; he is at the age of thirty-one, and is thoroughly unsatisfied with his life of leeching and "chasing the devil by his tail."

The ambiguity about what it is that Corley must pull off, and the half-said things running through the dialogue, and the many symbols and allusions, make the text a job to decipher, in true modernist style.

The harp is a symbol of Irish romanticism, and links with the idea of gallantry, which we are prepared for by the title, but meet the opposite of in the two main characters.

The harp stands for the uncorrupted ideal, but her cover lies around her knees, like a violated woman and the servant girl Corley is about to swindle.

The moon slowly being covered by rain clouds can also be read as the romantic ideal disappearing and being replaced by material gain.