THE LIGHTHOUSE

a muddle, about something some one had said
about Christ; a mammoth had been dug up in
a London street; what was the great Napoleon
like? Then they took all this with their clean
hands (they wore grey coloured clothes; they
smelt of heather) and they brushed the scraps
together, turning the paper, crossing their-knees,
and said something now and then very brief.
In a kind of trance she would take a book from
the shelf and stand there, watching her father
write, so equally, so neatly from one side of the
page to another, with a little cough now and then,
or something said briefly to the other old gentle-
man opposite. And she thought, standing there
with her book open, here one could let whatever
one thought expand like a leaf in water; and if it
did well here, among the old gentlemen smoking
and The Times crackling, then it was right. And
watching her father as he wrote in his study, she
thought (now sitting in the boat) he was most
lovable, he was most wise; he was not vain nor
a tyrant. Indeed, if he saw she was there,
reading a book, he would ask her, as gently
as any one could, Was there nothing he could
give her?

Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him
reading the little book with the shiny cover
mottled like a plover's egg. No; it was right.

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