But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter's beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud or saying poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was afraid; for sometimes it was awkward --

               Best and brightest come away!

poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her almost jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs.

Ramsay, though instantly taking his side against all  

the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh molehills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down to look, a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-​rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him.

But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-​throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure.

But she stopped herself. He never looked at things.

If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.

     At that moment, he said, “Very fine,” to please her, and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire them, or even realise that they were there. It was only to please her.... Ah, but was that not Lily Briscoe  

strolling along with William Bankes? She focussed her short-​sighted eyes upon the backs of a retreating couple. Yes, indeed it was. Did that not mean that they would marry? Yes, it must! What an admirable idea! They must marry!

     He had been to Amsterdam, Mr. Bankes was saying as he strolled across the lawn with Lily Briscoe.

He had seen the Rembrandts. He had been to Madrid.

Unfortunately, it was Good Friday and the Prado was shut. He had been to Rome. Had Miss Briscoe never been to Rome? Oh, she should --  It would be a wonderful experience for her -- the Sistine Chapel; Michael Angelo; and Padua, with its Giottos. His wife had been in bad health for many years, so that their sight-​seeing had been on a modest scale.

     She had been to Brussels; she had been to Paris but only for a flying visit to see an aunt who was ill. She had been to Dresden; there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures:

they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work. Mr. Bankes thought one could carry that point of view too far.  We can't all be  

Titians and we can't all be Darwins, he said; at the same time he doubted whether you could have your Darwin and your Titian if it weren't for humble people like ourselves.  Lily would have liked to pay him a compliment; you're not humble, Mr.

Bankes, she would have liked to have said.  But he did not want compliments (most men do, she thought), and she was a little ashamed of her impulse and said nothing while he remarked that perhaps what he was saying did not apply to pictures.

Anyhow, said Lily, tossing off her little insincerity she would always go on painting, because it interested her.  Yes, said Mr. Bankes, he was sure she would, and, as they reached the end of the lawn he was asking her whether she had difficulty in finding subjects in London when they turned and saw the Ramsays.  So that is marriage, Lily thought a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.  That is what Mrs. Ramsay tried to tell me the other night, she thought.  For Mrs. Ramsay was wearing a green shawl, and they were standing close together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches.

And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking  

the symbols of marriage, husband and wife.  Then after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches.  But still for a moment, though Mrs. Ramsay greeted them with her usual smile (oh, she's thinking we're going to get married, Lily thought) and said, “ I have triumphed tonight, ” meaning that for once Mr.

Bankes had agreed to dine with them and not run off to his own lodging where his man cooked vegetables properly; still, for one moment, there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space of irresponsibility as the ball soared high, and they followed it and lost it and saw the one star and the draped branches.  In the failing light they all looked sharp-​edged and ethereal and divided by great distances.  Then, darting backwards over the vast space (for it seemed as if solidity had vanished altogether) Prue ran full tilt into them and caught the ball brilliantly high up in her left hand, and her mother said, “Haven't they come back yet?” whereupon the spell was broken.  Mr. Ramsay felt free now to laugh out loud at the thought that Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on condition he said the Lord's Prayer, and chuckling to himself he strolled off to his study.  Mrs.

Ramsay, bringing Prue back into throwing catches again, from which she had escaped asked      “Did Nancy go with them?”

     (Certainly Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after lunch to her attic, to  escape the horror of family life.  She supposed she must go then.  She did not want to go.

She did not want to be drawn into it all.  For as they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept on taking her hand.  Then she would let it go.  Then she would take it again.  What was it she wanted?

Nancy asked herself.  There was something, of course, that people wanted; for when Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were Constantinople seen through a mist, and then however heavy-​eyed one might be, one must needs ask “Is that Santa Sofia?” “Is that the Golden Horn?”

So Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand.  “ What is it that she wants? Is it that? ”  And what was that?

Here and there emerged from the mist (as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her) a  

pinnacle, a dome; prominent things, without names.

But when Minta dropped her hand, as she did when they ran down the hillside, all that, the dome, the pinnacle, whatever it was that had protruded through the mist, sank down into it and disappeared.

Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a good walker.

She wore more sensible clothes that most women.

She wore very short skirts and black knickerbockers.

She would jump straight into a stream and flounder across.  He liked her rashness, but he saw that it would not do -- she would kill herself in some idiotic way one of these days.  She seemed to be afraid of nothing -- except bulls.  At the mere sight of a bull in a field she would throw up her arms and fly screaming, which was the very thing to enrage a bull of course.  But she did not mind owning up to it in the least; one must admit that.  She knew she was an awful coward about bulls, she said.

She thought she must have been tossed in her perambulator when she was a baby.  She didn't seem to mind what she said or did.  Suddenly now she pitched down on the edge of the cliff and began to sing some song about      Damn your eyes, damn your eyes.

They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and shout out together:

     Damn your eyes, damn your eyes but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good hunting-​grounds before they got on to the beach.

     “Fatal,” Paul agreed, springing up, and as they went slithering down, he kept quoting the guide-​book about “ these islands being justly celebrated for their park-​like prospects and the extent and variety of their marine curiosities.