”  But it would not do altogether, this shouting and damning your eyes Andrew felt, picking his way down the cliff, this clapping him on the back, and calling him “ old fellow ” and all that; it would not altogether do.

It was the worst of taking women on walks.  Once on the beach they separated, he going out on to the Pope's Nose, taking his shoes off, and rolling his socks in them and letting that couple look after themselves; Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves.  She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-​like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock.

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation  

like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.  Out on the pale criss-​crossed sand, high-​stepping, fringed gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side.  And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness.  So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded.

     And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in so she leapt splashing through the shallow waves on to the shore and ran up the beach and was carried by her own impetuosity and her desire for rapid movement right behind a rock and there -- oh heavens! in each other's arms, were Paul and Minta kissing probably.  She was outraged, indignant.  She  

and Andrew put on their shoes and stockings in dead silence without saying a thing about it.  Indeed they were rather sharp with each other.  She might have called him when she saw the crayfish or whatever it was, Andrew grumbled.  However, they both felt it's not our fault.  They had not wanted this horrid nuisance to happen.  All the same it irritated Andrew that Nancy should be a woman, and Nancy that Andrew should be a man, and they tied their shoes very neatly and drew the bows rather tight.

     It was not until they had climbed right up on to the top of the cliff again that Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmother's brooch -- her grandmother's brooch, the sole ornament she possessed --

a weeping willow, it was (they must remember it)

set in pearls.  They must have seen it, she said, with the tears running down her cheeks, the brooch which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life.  Now she had lost it.  She would rather have lost anything than that!  She would go back and look for it.  They all went back.  They poked and peered and looked.  They kept their heads very low, and said things shortly and gruffly.  Paul Rayley searched like a madman all about the rock where they had been sitting.  All this pother about a brooch really didn't do at all, Andrew thought, as Paul told him to make a " thorough search between  

this point and that. "  The tide was coming in fast.

The sea would cover the place where they had sat in a minute.  There was not a ghost of a chance of their finding it now.  “We shall be cut off!” Minta shrieked, suddenly terrified.  As if there were any danger of that!  It was the same as the bulls all over again -- she had no control over her emotions Andrew thought.  Women hadn't.  The wretched Paul had to pacify her.  The men (Andrew and Paul at once became manly, and different from usual) took counsel briefly and decided that they would plant Rayley's stick where they had sat and come back at low tide again.  There was nothing more that could be done now.  If the brooch was there, it would still be there in the morning, they assured her, but Minta still sobbed, all the way up to the top of the cliff.

It was her grandmother's brooch; she would rather have lost anything but that, and yet Nancy felt, it might be true that she minded losing her brooch, but she wasn't crying only for that.  She was crying for something else.  We might all sit down and cry, she felt.  But she did not know what for.

     They drew ahead together, Paul and Minta, and he comforted her, and said how famous he was for finding things.  Once when he was a little boy he had found a gold watch.  He would get up at daybreak and he was positive he would find it.  It seemed to  

him that it would be almost dark, and he would be alone on the beach, and somehow it would be rather dangerous.  He began telling her, however, that he would certainly find it, and she said that she would not hear of his getting up at dawn: it was lost: she knew that: she had had a presentiment when she put it on that afternoon.  And secretly he resolved that he would not tell her, but he would slip out of the house at dawn when they were all asleep and if he could not find it he would go to Edinburgh and buy her another, just like it but more beautiful.

He would prove what he could do.  And as they came out on the hill and saw the lights of the town beneath them, the lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were going to happen to him -- his marriage, his children, his house; and again he thought, as they came out on to the high road, which was shaded with high bushes, how they would retreat into solitude together, and walk on and on, he always leading her, and she pressing close to his side (as she did now).  As they turned by the cross roads he thought what an appalling experience he had been through, and he must tell some one --

Mrs. Ramsay of course, for it took his breath away to think what he had been and done.  It had been far and away the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him.  He would go straight to Mrs. Ramsay, because he felt somehow that she  

was the person who had made him do it.  She had made him think he could do anything.  Nobody else took him seriously.  But she made him believe that he could do whatever he wanted.  He had felt her eyes on him all day today, following him about (though she never said a word) as if she were saying “ Yes, you can do it.  I believe in you.  I expect it of you. ”  She had made him feel all that, and directly they got back (he looked for the lights of the house above the bay) he would go to her and say, “I've done it, Mrs. Ramsay; thanks to you.”

And so turning into the lane that led to the house he could see lights moving about in the upper windows.  They must be awfully late then.  People were getting ready for dinner.  The house was all lit up, and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full, and he said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights, and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came into the house staring about him with his face quite stiff.  But, good heavens, he said to himself, putting his hand to his tie, I must not make a fool of myself..)

     “Yes,” said Prue, in her considering way answering her mother's question, “ I think Nancy did go with them. ”

     Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs. Ramsay supposed, wondering, as she put down a brush took up a comb, and said “Come in” to a tap at the door (Jasper and Rose came in), whether the fact that Nancy was with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs. Ramsay felt, very irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable.  They could not all be drowned.  And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

     Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner.

     “Not for the Queen of England,” said Mrs.

Ramsay emphatically.

     “Not for the Empress of Mexico,” she added laughing at Jasper; for he shared his mother's vice:

he, too, exaggerated.

     And if Rose liked, she said, while Jasper took the message, she might choose which jewels she was to wear.  When there are fifteen people sitting down to dinner, one cannot keep things waiting for ever.

She was now beginning to feel annoyed with them for being so late; it was inconsiderate of them, and it annoyed her on top of her anxiety about them  

that they should choose this very night to be out late, when, in fact, she wished the dinner to be particularly nice, since William Bankes had at last consented to dine with them; and they were having Mildred's masterpiece -- B$oeuf en Daube.  Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready.  The beef, the bayleaf, and the wine -- all must be done to a turn.  To keep it waiting was out of the question.  Yet of course tonight of all nights, out they went, and they came in late and things had to be sent out , things had to be kept hot; the B$oeuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt.

     Jasper offered her an opal necklace; Rose a gold necklace.  Which looked best against her black dress? Which did indeed, said Mrs. Ramsay absent-​mindedly looking at her neck and shoulders (but avoiding her face) in the glass.  And then, while the children rummaged among her things, she looked out of the window at a sight which always amused her -- the rooks trying to decide which tree to settle on.  Every time, they seemed to change their minds and rose up into the air again, because, she thought the old rook, the father rook, old Joseph was her name for him, was a bird of a very trying and difficult disposition.  He was a disreputable old bird, with half his wing feathers missing.  He was like  

some seedy old gentleman in a top hat she had seen playing the horn in front of a public house.

     “Look!” she said, laughing.  They were actually fighting.  Joseph and Mary were fighting.  Anyhow they all went up again, and the air was shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes.  The movement of the wings beating out, out, out -- she could never describe it accurately enough to please herself -- was one of the loveliest of all to her.  Look at that, she said to Rose, hoping that Rose would see it more clearly than she could.

For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.

     But which was it to be?  They had all the trays of her jewel-​case open.  The gold necklace, which was Italian, or the opal necklace, which Uncle James had brought her from India; or should she wear her amethysts?

     “Choose, dearests, choose,” she said, hoping that they would make haste.

     But she let them take their time to choose: she let Rose, particularly, take up this and then that and hold her jewels against the black dress, for this little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through every night, was what Rose liked best, she knew.  She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her  

mother was to wear.  What was the reason, Mrs.

Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one's mother at Rose's age.

Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad.  It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was.  And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep feelings, and she said she was ready now, and they would go down, and Jasper, because he was the gentleman should give her his arm, and Rose, as she was the lady, should carry her handkerchief (she gave her the handkerchief), and what else? oh, yes, it might be cold: a shawl.  Choose me a shawl, she said, for that would please Rose, who was bound to suffer so.  “There,” she said, stopping by the window on the landing, “there they are again.”  Joseph had settled on another tree-​top.  “ Don't you think they mind, “she said to Jasper,” having their wings broken? ”  Why did he want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary?  He shuffled a little on the stairs, and felt rebuked, but not seriously, for she did not understand the fun of shooting birds; and they did not feel; and being his mother she lived away in  

another division of the world, but he rather liked her stories about Mary and Joseph.  She made him laugh.  But how did she know that those were Mary and Joseph?  Did she think the same birds came to the same trees every night? he asked.  But here suddenly, like all grown-​up people, she ceased to pay him the least attention.  She was listening to a clatter in the hall.

     “They've come back!” she exclaimed, and at once she felt much more annoyed with them than relieved.  Then she wondered, had it happened?  She would go down and they would tell her -- but no.

They could not tell her anything, with all these people about.  So she must go down and begin dinner and wait.  And, like some queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall, looks down upon them and descends among them, and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion and their prostration before her (Paul did not move a muscle but looked straight before him as she passed)

she went down, and crossed the hall and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted what they could not say: their tribute to her beauty.

     But she stopped.  There was a smell of burning.

Could they have let the B$oeuf en Daube overboil?

she wondered, pray heaven not! when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively  

that all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their washing-​tables and dressing tables and the novels on the bed-​tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-​room for dinner.

     But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs.

Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table and looking at all the plates making white circles on it.  “William, sit by me,” she said.  “Lily,” she said wearily, “over there.”  They had that -- Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle -- she, only this -- an infinitely long table and plates and knives.  At the far end was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning.  What at?  She did not know.  She did not mind.  She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him.  She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy --

there -- and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.  It's all come to an end she thought, while they came in one after another  

Charles Tansley -- “Sit there, please,” she said --

Augustus Carmichael -- and sat down.  And meanwhile she waited, passively, for some one to answer her, for something to happen.  But this is not a thing she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.

     Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy -- that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing -- ladling out soup -- she felt, more and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and, robbed of colour, she saw things truly.

The room (she looked round it) was very shabby.

There was no beauty anywhere.  She forebore to look at Mr. Tansley.  Nothing seemed to have merged.

They all sat separate.  And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.

Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking --

one, two, three, one, two, three.  And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper.  And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankes -- poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in  

lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him life being now strong enough to bear her on again she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.

     “ Did you find your letters?  I told them to put them in the hall for you, ” she said to William Bankes.

     Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-​man's land where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon.

     How old she looks, how worn she looks, Lily thought, and how remote.  Then when she turned to William Bankes, smiling, it was as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again, and Lily thought with some amusement because she was relieved, Why does she pity him?  For that was the impression she gave, when she told him that his letters were in the hall.  Poor William Bankes, she seemed to be saying, as if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the life in her, her  

resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity.  And it was not true, Lily thought; it was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other people's.  He is not in the least pitiable.

He has his work, Lily said to herself.  She remembered all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work.  In a flash she saw her picture and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space.

Lighthouse

That's what I shall do.  That's what has been puzzling me.  She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower pattern in the table-​cloth so as to remind herself to move the tree.

     “ It's odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one always wants one's letters, ”

said Mr. Bankes.

     What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean, as if Lily thought (he sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of his meals.  Everything about him had that meagre fixity, that bare unloveliness.  But nevertheless, the fact remained it was impossible to dislike any one if one  

looked at them.  She liked his eyes; they were blue deep set, frightening.

     “Do you write many letters, Mr. Tansley?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, pitying him too, Lily supposed; for that was true of Mrs. Ramsay -- she pitied men always as if they lacked something -- women never as if they had something.  He wrote to his mother;

otherwise he did not suppose he wrote one letter a month, said Mr. Tansley, shortly.

     For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these people wanted him to talk.  He was not going to be condescended to by these silly women.  He had been reading in his room, and now he came down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy.  Why did they dress?  He had come down in his ordinary clothes.  He had not got any dress clothes.  “ One never gets anything worth having by post ” -- that was the sort of thing they were always saying.  They made men say that sort of thing.  Yes, it was pretty well true, he thought.  They never got anything worth having from one year's end to another.  They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat.  It was the women's fault.  Women made civilisation impossible with all their “charm,” all their silliness.

     " No going to the Lighthouse tomorrow, Mrs.

Ramsay, " he said, asserting himself.  He liked her;

he admired her; he still thought of the man in the  

drain-​pipe looking up at her; but he felt it necessary to assert himself.

     He was really, Lily Briscoe thought, in spite of his eyes, but then look at his nose, look at his hands the most uncharming human being she had ever met.

Then why did she mind what he said?  Women can't write, women can't paint -- what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?  Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather painful effort?  She must make it once more.  There's the sprig on the table-​cloth; there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters -- nothing else.  Could she not hold fast to that, she asked herself, and not lose her temper, and not argue; and if she wanted revenge take it by laughing at him?

     “Oh, Mr. Tansley,” she said, “ do take me to the Lighthouse with you.  I should so love it. ”

     She was telling lies he could see.  She was saying what she did not mean to annoy him, for some reason.

She was laughing at him.  He was in his old flannel trousers.  He had no others.  He felt very rough and isolated and lonely.  He knew that she was trying to tease him for some reason; she didn't want to go to the Lighthouse with him; she despised him:

so did Prue Ramsay; so did they all.  But he was not going to be made a fool of by women, so he turned deliberately in his chair and looked out of the window and said, all in a jerk, very rudely, it would be too rough for her tomorrow.  She would be sick.

     It annoyed him that she should have made him speak like that, with Mrs. Ramsay listening.  If only he could be alone in his room working, he thought among his books.  That was where he felt at his ease.

And he had never run a penny into debt; he had never cost his father a penny since he was fifteen; he had helped them at home out of his savings; he was educating his sister.  Still, he wished he had known how to answer Miss Briscoe properly; he wished it had not come out all in a jerk like that.

“You'd be sick.”  He wished he could think of something to say to Mrs. Ramsay, something which would show her that he was not just a dry prig.  That was what they all thought him.  He turned to her.

But Mrs. Ramsay was talking about people he had never heard of to William Bankes.

     “Yes, take it away,” she said briefly, interrupting what she was saying to William Bankes to speak to the maid.

“ It must have been fifteen -- no, twenty years ago -- that I last saw her, ” she was saying, turning back to him again as if she could not lose a moment of their talk, for she was absorbed by what they  

were saying.  So he had actually heard from her this evening!  And was Carrie still living at Marlow, and was everything still the same?  Oh, she could remember as if it were yesterday -- going on the river, feeling very cold.  But if the Mannings made a plan they stuck to it.  Never should she forget Herbert killing a wasp with a teaspoon on the bank!  And it was still going on, Mrs. Ramsay mused, gliding like a ghost among the chairs and tables of that drawing-​room on the banks of the Thames where she had been so very, very cold twenty years ago; but now she went among them like a ghost; and it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very still and beautiful, had remained there, all these years.  Had Carrie written to him herself? she asked.

     “ Yes.  She says they're building a new billiard room, ” he said.  No!  No!  That was out of the question!  Building a new billiard room!  It seemed to her impossible.

     Mr. Bankes could not see that there was anything very odd about it.  They were very well off now.

Should he give her love to Carrie?

     “Oh,” said Mrs. Ramsay with a little start, “No,”

she added, reflecting that she did not know this Carrie who built a new billiard room.  But how strange she repeated, to Mr. Bankes's amusement, that they  

should be going on there still.  For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time.  How eventful her own life had been, during those same years.  Yet perhaps Carrie had not thought about her, either.  The thought was strange and distasteful.

     “People soon drift apart,” said Mr. Bankes feeling, however, some satisfaction when he thought that after all he knew both the Mannings and the Ramsays.  He had not drifted apart he thought, laying down his spoon and wiping his clean-​shaven lips punctiliously.  But perhaps he was rather unusual, he thought, in this; he never let himself get into a groove.  He had friends in all circles....  Mrs.

Ramsay had to break off here to tell the maid something about keeping food hot.  That was why he preferred dining alone.  All those interruptions annoyed him. Well, thought William Bankes, preserving a demeanour of exquisite courtesy and merely spreading the fingers of his left hand on the table-​cloth as a mechanic examines a tool beautifully polished and ready for use in an interval of leisure such are the sacrifices one's friends ask of one.  It would have hurt her if he had refused to come.  But it was not worth it for him.  Looking at his hand he  

thought that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work.  Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time.  The children were dropping in still.  “ I wish one of you would run up to Roger's room, ” Mrs.

Ramsay was saying.  How trifling it all is, how boring it all is, he thought, compared with the other thing -- work.  Here he sat drumming his fingers on the table-​cloth when he might have been -- he took a flashing bird's-​eye view of his work.  What a waste of time it all was to be sure!  Yet, he thought, she is one of my oldest friends.  I am by way of being devoted to her.  Yet now, at this moment her presence meant absolutely nothing to him: her beauty meant nothing to him; her sitting with her little boy at the window -- nothing, nothing.

He wished only to be alone and to take up that book.  He felt uncomfortable; he felt treacherous that he could sit by her side and feel nothing for her.  The truth was that he did not enjoy family life.  It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, What does one live for?  Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on?  Is it so very desirable?  Are we attractive as a species?  Not so very, he thought, looking at those rather untidy boys.  His favourite, Cam, was in bed he supposed.  Foolish questions, vain questions, questions  

one never asked if one was occupied. Is human life this?  Is human life that?  One never had time to think about it.  But here he was asking himself that sort of question, because Mrs. Ramsay was giving orders to servants, and also because it had struck him, thinking how surprised Mrs.