She knew that he would never do it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about the boys but not about him. Years ago, before he had married he thought, looking across the bay, as they stood between the clumps of red-​hot pokers, he had walked all day. He had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house. He had worked ten hours at a stretch; an old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire. That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a single village for miles on end. One could worry things out alone. There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you. It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone -- he broke off, sighing. He  

had no right. The father of eight children -- he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole -- his eight children. They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.

     “Poor little place,” he murmured with a sigh.

     She heard him. He said the most melancholy things but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual.

All this phrase-​making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.

     It annoyed her, this phrase-​making, and she said to him, in a matter-​of-​fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining for she guessed what he was thinking -- he would have written better books if he had not married.

     He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain. She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity  

that brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.

     They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the silver-​green spear-​like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young man's arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors seemed not to depress him, but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. His understanding often astonished her.