TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

scattered about English drawing-rooms in the
nineteenth century, had lisped so charmingly,
had stormed so wildly, and all her wit and her
bearing and her temper came from them, and
not from the sluggish English, or the cold
Scotch; but more profoundly she ruminated the
other problem, of rich and poor, and the things
she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here
or in London, when she visited this widow, or
that struggling wife in person with a bag on
her arm, and a note-book and pencil with which
she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for
the purpose wages and spendings, employment
and unemployment, in the hope that thus she
would cease to be a private woman whose charity
was half a sop to her own indignation, half a
relief to her own curiosity, and become, what
with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an
investigator, elucidating the social problem.

Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her,
standing there, holding James by the hand. He
had followed her into the drawing-room, that
young man they laughed at; he was standing by
the table, fidgeting with something, awkwardly,
feeling himself out of things, as she knew without
looking round. They had all gone—the children;
Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley; Augustus Car-
michael; her husband—they had all gone. So she
20