THE WINDOW

to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how
she would have put it; but it would have been
something critical. She had been annoyed the
other night by some highhandedness. Looking
along the level of Mr. Bankes' glance at her, she
thought that no woman could worship another
woman in the way he worshipped; they could
only seek shelter under the shade which Mr.
Bankes extended over them both. Looking along
his beam she added to it her different ray,
thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest
of people (bowed over her book); the best
perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect
shape which one saw there. But why different,
and how different? she asked herself, scraping
her palette of all those mounds of blue and green
which seemed to her like clods with no life in
them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them,
force them to move, flow, do her bidding to-
morrow. How did she differ? What was the
spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had
you found a glove in the corner of a sofa, you
would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers
indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an
arrow for directness. She was wilful; she was
commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I
am thinking of her relations with women, and I
am much younger, an insignificant person, living

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