TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

spectacles and laughed at them. What they saicf
she could not remember, but only she and Charles
throwing stones and getting on very well all of a
sudden and Mrs. Ramsay watching them. She
was highly conscious of that. Mrs. Ramsay, she
thought, stepping back and screwing up her eyes,
(It must have altered the design a good deal when
she was sitting on the step with James. There
must have been a shadow.) Mrs. Ramsay. When
she thought of herself and Charles throwing
ducks and drakes and of the whole scene on
the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon
Mrs. Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad
on her knee, writing letters. (She wrote in-
numerable letters, and sometimes the wind took
them and she and Charles just saved a page from,
the sea.) But what a power was in the huaaarf
soul! she thought. That woman sitting there,
writing under the rock resolved everything into
simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off
like old rags; she brought together this and that
and then this, and so made out of that miserable
silliness and spite (she and Charles squabbling,
sparring, had been silly and spiteful) something
—this scene on the beach for example, this
moment of friendship and liking—which sur-
vived, after all these years, complete, so that she
dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him,
248