TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

since he was fifteen; he had helped them at home
out of his savings; he was educating his sister.
Still, he wished he had known how to answer
Miss Briscoe properly; he wished it had not come
out all in a jerk like that. " You'd be sick." He
wished he could think of something to say to
Mrs. Ramsay, something which would show her
that he was not just a dry prig. That was what
they all thought him. He turned to her. But
Mrs. Ramsay was talking about people he had
never heard of to William Bankes.

" Yes, take it away," she said briefly, inter-
rupting what she was saying to Mr. Bankes to
speak to the maid. " It must have been fifteen—
no, twenty years ago—that I last saw her," she
was saying, turning back to him again as if she
could not lose a moment of their talk, for she was
absorbed by what they were saying. So he had
actually heard from her this evening! And was
Carrie still living at Marlow, and was everything
still the same? Oh she could remember it as if
it were yesterday—going on the river, feeling very
cold. But if the Mannings made a plan they
stuck to it. Never should she forget Herbert
killing a wasp with a teaspoon on the bank! And
it was still going on, Mrs. Ramsay mused, gliding
like a ghost among the chairs and tables of that
drawing-room on the banks of the Thames where
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