THE WINDOW

the Reform Bill; sea-birds and butterflies; people;
while the sun poured into those attics, which a
plank alone separated from each other so that
every footstep could be plainly heard and the
Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying
of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit
up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots,
beetles, and the skulls of small birds, while it
drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed
pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds,
which was in the towels too, gritty with sand
from bathing.

Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, pre-
judices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh that
they should begin so early, Mrs. Ramsay deplored.
They were so critical, her children. They talked
such nonsense. She went from the dining-room,
holding James by the hand, since he would not
go with the others. It seemed to her such
nonsense—inventing differences, when people,
heaven knows, were different enough without that.
The real differences, she thought, standing by the
drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough.
She had in mind at the moment, rich and poor,
high and low; the great in birth receiving from
her, half grudging, some respect, for had she
not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if
slightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters,

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