THE   WINDOW
these days, he would read aloud, to one or two
friends. There, in a society where one could say
what one liked he would sarcastically describe
" staying with the Ramsays " and what nonsense
they talked. It was worth while doing it once,
he would say; but not again. The women bored
one so, he would say. Of course Ramsay had
dished himself by marrying a beautiful woman and
having eight children. It would shape itself
something like that, but now, at this moment,
sitting stuck there with an empty seat beside him
nothing had shaped itself at all. It was all in
scraps and fragments. He felt extremely, even
physically, uncomfortable. He wanted some-
body to give him a chance of asserting himself.
He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his
chair, looked at this person, then at that person,
tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth
and shut it again. They were talking about the
fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his
opinion? What did they know about the fishing
industry?
Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite
him could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph,
the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire
to impress himself lying dark in the mist of his
flesh—that thin mist which convention had laid
over his burning desire to break into the
141