TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Filled with her words, like a child who drops
off satisfied, he said, at last, looking at her with
humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he
would take a turn; he would watch the children
playing cricket. He went.

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold
herself together, one petal closed in another, and
the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself,
so that she had only strength enough to move her
finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion,
across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there
throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring
which has expanded to its full width and now
gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful
creation.

Every throb of this pulse seemed, as he walked'
away, to enclose her and her husband, and to give
to each that solace which two different notes, one
high, one low, struck together, seem to give each
other as they combine. Yet, as the resonance
died, and she turned to the Fairy Tale again, Mrs.
Ramsay felt not only exhausted in body (after-
wards, not at the time, she always felt this) but
also there tinged her physical fatigue some faintly
disagreeable sensation with another origin. Not
that, as she read aloud the story of the Fisherman's
Wife, she knew precisely what it came from; nor
did she let herself put into words her dissatfs-
64