THE WINDOW

cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her, and
Lily, looking at Minta being charming to Mr.
Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for
her exposed to those fangs, and was thankful.
For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight
of the salt cellar on the pattern> she need not
marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that
degradation. She was saved from that dilution.
She would move the tree rather more to the
middle.

Such was the complexity of things. For what
happened to her, especially staying with the
Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two
opposite things at the same time; that's what you
feel, was one; that's what I feel was the other,
and then they fought together in her mind, as now.
It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I
tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of
my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach;
also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human
passions, and turns a nice young man with a
profile like a gem (Paul's was exquisite) into a
bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was
insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet she said to
herself, from the dawn of time odes have been
sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if
you asked nine people out of- ten they would say
they wanted nothing but this; while the women,