TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

She could not help laughing herself sometimes.
She said, the other day, something about " waves
mountains high ". Yes, said Charles Tansley,
it was a little rough. " Aren't you drenched to
the skin?" she had said, ''Damp, not wet
through/' said Mr. Tansley, pinching his sleeve,
feeling his socks.

But it was not that they minded, the children
said. It was not his face; it was not his manners.
It was him—his point of view. When they
talked about something interesting, people, music,
history, anything, even said it was a fine evening
so why not sit out of doors, then what they com-
plained of about Charles Tansley was that until
he had turned the whole thing round and made
it somehow reflect himself and disparage them,
put them all on edge somehow with his acid way
of peeling the flesh and blood off everything, he
was not satisfied. And he would go to picture
galleries, they said, and he would ask one, did
one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one
did not.

Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the
dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight
sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay
sought their bedrooms, their fastnesses in a house
where there was no other privacy to debate any-
thing, everything; Tansley's tie; the passing of
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