THE LIGHTHOUSE

looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncom-
promising white stare; from the canvas to the
garden. There was something (she stood screw-
ing up her little Chinese eyes in her small puckered
face) something she remembered in the relations
of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and
in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of
blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind;
which had tied a knot in her mind so that at odds
and ends of time, involuntarily, as she walked
along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her
hair, she found herself painting that picture,
passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in
imagination. But there was all the difference in
the world between this planning airily away
from the canvas, and actually taking her brush
and making the first mark.

She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation
at Mr. Ramsay's presence, and her easel, rammed
into the earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle.
And now that she had put that right, and in so
doing had subdued the impertinences and irrele-
vances that plucked her attention and made her
remember how she was such and such a person,
had such and such relations to people, she took
her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it
stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy
in the air. Where to begin?—that was the