TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

you ". But no. He did not like to see her look so
sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she protested,
flushing a little. They both felt uncomfortable,
as if they did not know whether to go on or go
back. She had been reading fairy tales to James,
she said. No, they could not share that; they
could not say that.

They had reached the gap between the two
clumps of red-hot pokers, and there was the
Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself
look at it. Had she known that he was looking
at her, she thought, she would not have let herself
sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that
reminded her that she had been seen sitting
thinking. So she looked over her shoulder, at the
town. The lights were rippling and running as
if they were drops of silver water held firm in a
wind. And all the poverty, all the suffering had
turned to that, Mrs, Ramsay thought. The lights
of the town and of the harbour and of the boats
seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark
something which had sunk. Well, if he could not
share her thoughts, Mr, Ramsay said to himself,
he would be off, then, on his own. He wanted to
go on thinking, telling himself the story how
Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted to laugh.
But first it was nonsense to be anxious about
Andrew. When he was Andrew's age he used to
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