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[ Aetat. 36-37 ] J O Y C E 469intervention is not essential to explain it. Her caprices were well knownand needed no special instigation; she withdrew a subsidy from PhilippJarnach with the same suddenness. In later life Mrs. McCormick managedto spend away her enormous fortune with a similar instability.It is unlikely that Joyce would allow her to escape scot-free from artisticpunishment; and in the Circe episode of Ulysses, Mrs. Mervyn Talboys,the society woman with a riding crop and a sadistic bent, may owesomething to Edith Rockefeller McCormick, a noted horsewoman. Butwhen Joyce heard of her death in 1932, he wrote a more consideredtribute: i am sorry to learn of the death of Mrs McCormick. She wasvery kind to me at a difficult moment and was a woman of considerabledistinction. I do not know what happened afterwards though I suspectbut this does not obliterate her act prompted by humanity and generosity.'52She had, in fact, helped to give him a year of comparative easeduring which he wrote an important part of Ulysses.It was with this unpleasant sense of a breach with his patron that Joyce,his means greatly reduced, took his family to Trieste in mid-October of1919.