She had enjoyed it forless than a year, however.
Then hewould look up benevolently as always, from his smoky vague green
eyes.
Look at him now, she wanted to say aloud to James.
She alone spoke the truth; to her alonecould he speak it.
She thought that she knew how it went though,
slowly and sonorously. The old gentlemen in thestudy she thought could have told
her.
That done, his mind flew back againand he plunged
into his reading.
She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb
over. The boat was now half way across the bay. Her heart leapt at her andseized her
and tortured her.
There wassomething perhaps wrong with the design?
How monotonous, they wouldsay, and the same always!
One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she
reflected. She remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush. Suddenly the
window at which she was looking was whitened by some lightstuff behind it. But with
what attitudes andwith what words?
Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her
beauty.
Hadhe marched through Trafalgar Square grasping a
big stick? There wassomething perhaps wrong with the design? For how could one
expressin words these emotions of the body?
Some notion was in both of them aboutthe
ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought.
Are you goingto be so bold as to sit in the
sun?
But Mr Ramsay went on reading with his legs curled
underhim.
Also, sheremembered, smiling at the slipper that
dangled from his foot, he wasgrowing famous.
Then he would turn smooth as silk, affable,
urbane,and try to win her so.
An earwig,Prue murmured, awestruck, in his milk.
She reducedthem to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony.
Let it come, she thought, if it will come. And she stepped slowly, quietly on shore.
She talked to a servant, saying simplywhatever came into her head. Nobody knew
exactly what had happenedto her.
It was sometimes hardly tobe seen across the bay.