Ramsay scowled like that.

     And why not? Mrs. Ramsay demanded.  Surely they could let Augustus have his soup if he wanted it.  He hated people wallowing in food, Mr.

Ramsay frowned at her.  He hated everything dragging on for hours like this.  But he had controlled himself, Mr. Ramsay would have her observe disgusting though the sight was.  But why show it so plainly, Mrs. Ramsay demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other felt).  Everybody could see Mrs. Ramsay thought.  There was Rose gazing at her father, there was Roger gazing at his father;

both would be off in spasms of laughter in another second, she knew, and so she said promptly (indeed it was time):

     “Light the candles,” and they jumped up instantly and went and fumbled at the sideboard.

     Why could he never conceal his feelings? Mrs.

Ramsay wondered, and she wondered if Augustus Carmichael had noticed.  Perhaps he had; perhaps he had not.  She could not help respecting the composure with which he sat there, drinking his soup.  If he wanted soup, he asked for soup.

Whether people laughed at him or were angry with him he was the same.  He did not like her, she knew that; but partly for that very reason she respected him, and looking at him, drinking soup, very large and calm in the failing light, and monumental, and contemplative, she wondered what he did feel then and why he was always content and dignified; and she thought how devoted he was to Andrew, and would call him into his room, and Andrew said “show him things.”  And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds and then he clapped his paws together when he had found the word, and her husband said, “ Poor old Augustus -- he's a true poet, ” which was high praise from her husband.

     Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit.

What had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered for Rose's arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-​lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune's banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold....  Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one's staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive.  That was his way of looking, different from hers.  But looking together united them.

     Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the  

night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things waved and vanished waterily.

     Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there.  Mrs. Ramsay, who had been uneasy, waiting for Paul and Minta to come in, and unable, she felt, to settle to things, now felt her uneasiness changed to expectation.  For now they must come, and Lily Briscoe, trying to analyse the cause of the sudden exhilaration, compared it with that moment on the tennis lawn, when solidity suddenly vanished, and such vast spaces lay between them;

and now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparely furnished room, and the uncurtained windows, and the bright mask-​like look of faces seen by candlelight.  Some weight was taken off them; anything might happen, she felt.  They must come now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, looking at the door, and at that instant, Minta Doyle, Paul Rayley and a maid carrying a great dish in her hands came  

in together.  They were awfully late; they were horribly late, Minta said, as they found their way to different ends of the table.

     “I lost my brooch -- my grandmother's brooch,”

said Minta with a sound of lamentation in her voice and a suffusion in her large brown eyes, looking down, looking up, as she sat by Mr. Ramsay, which roused his chivalry so that he bantered her.

     How could she be such a goose, he asked, as to scramble about the rocks in jewels?

     She was by way of being terrified of him -- he was so fearfully clever, and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George Eliot she had been really frightened, for she had left the third volume of Middlemarch# in the train and she never knew what happened in the end; but afterwards she got on perfectly, and made herself out even more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her she was a fool.  And so tonight directly he laughed at her, she was not frightened.

Besides, she knew, directly she came into the room that the miracle had happened; she wore her golden haze.  Sometimes she had it; sometimes not.  She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man looked at her.

Yes, tonight she had it, tremendously; she knew  

that by the way Mr. Ramsay told her not to be a fool.  She sat beside him, smiling.

     It must have happened then, thought Mrs. Ramsay;

they are engaged.  And for a moment she felt what she had never expected to feel again -- jealousy.

For he, her husband, felt it too -- Minta's glow; he liked these girls, these golden-​reddish girls, with something flying, something a little wild and harum-​scarum about them, who didn't “ scrape their hair off, ” weren't, as he said about poor Lily Briscoe “... skimpy.”  There was some quality which she herself had not, some lustre, some richness, which attracted him, amused him, led him to make favourites of girls like Minta.  They might cut his hair from him, plait him watch-​chains, or interrupt him at his work, hailing him (she heard them), “ Come along, Mr. Ramsay; it's our turn to beat them now, ”

and out he came to play tennis.

     But indeed she was not jealous, only, now and then, when she made herself look in her glass, a little resentful that she had grown old, perhaps by her own fault.  (The bill for the greenhouse and all the rest of it.)  She was grateful to them for laughing at him.  (“ How many pipes have you smoked today, Mr. Ramsay? ” and so on), till he seemed a young man; a man very attractive to women, not burdened, not weighed down with the greatness of his labours and the sorrows of the  

world and his fame or his failure, but again as she had first known him, gaunt but gallant; helping her out of a boat, she remembered; with delightful ways, like that (she looked at him, and he looked astonishingly young, teasing Minta).  For herself --

“Put it down there,” she said, helping the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which was the B$oeuf en Daube -- for her own part, she liked her boobies.  Paul must sit by her.  She had kept a place for him.  Really, she sometimes thought she liked the boobies best.  They did not bother one with their dissertations.  How much they missed after all, these very clever men!  How dried up they did become, to be sure.  There was something, she thought as he sat down, very charming about Paul.

His manners were delightful to her, and his sharp-​cut nose and his bright blue eyes.  He was so considerate.

Would he tell her -- now that they were all talking again -- what had happened?

     “We went back to look for Minta's brooch,” he said, sitting down by her.  “We” -- that was enough.

She knew from the effort, the rise in his voice to surmount a difficult word that it was the first time he had said “we.”  “We did this, we did that.”

They'll say that all their lives, she thought, and an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little  

flourish, took the cover off.  The cook had spent three days over that dish.  And she must take great care Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes.

And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought.

This will celebrate the occasion -- a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound -- for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, mor impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers these people entering into illusion glittering eyed must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.

     “It is a triumph,” said Mr. Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment.  He had eaten attentively.

It was rich; it was tender.  It was perfectly cooked.

How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? he asked her.  She was a wonderful woman.  All his love, all his reverence, had returned;

and she knew it.

     “It is a French recipe of my grandmother's,”

said Mrs. Ramsay, speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice.  Of course it was French.  What  

passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed).  It is putting cabbages in water.  It is roasting meat till it is like leather.  It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables.  “In which,”

said Mr. Bankes, “ all the virtue of the vegetable is contained. ”  And the waste, said Mrs. Ramsay.  A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away.  Spurred on by her sense that William's affection had come back to her, and that everything was all right again, and that her suspense was over, and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily thought, How childlike, how absurd she was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her talking about the skins of vegetables.  There was something frightening about her.  She was irresistible.

Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought.  Now she had brought this off -- Paul and Minta, one might suppose, were engaged.  Mr.

Bankes was dining here.  She put a spell on them all by wishing, so simply, so directly, and Lily contrasted that abundance with her own poverty of spirit, and supposed that it was partly that belief (for her face was all lit up -- without looking young she looked radiant) in this strange, this terrifying thing, which made Paul Rayley, sitting at her side all of a tremor, yet abstract, absorbed, silent.  Mrs.

Ramsay, Lily felt, as she talked about the skins of vegetables, exalted that, worshipped that; held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it, and yet having brought it all about, somehow laughed, led her victims, Lily felt, to the altar.  It came over her too now -- the emotion, the vibration, of love.

How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul's side!

He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he bound for adventure; she, moored to the shore; he launched, incautious; she, solitary, left out -- and ready to implore a share, if it were a disaster, in his disaster, she said shyly:

     “When did Minta lose her brooch?”

     He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.  He shook his head.  “ On the beach, ” he said.

     “I'm going to find it,” he said, “ I'm getting up early. ”  This being kept secret from Minta, he lowered his voice, and turned his eyes to where she sat laughing, beside Mr. Ramsay.

     Lily wanted to protest violently and outrageously her desire to help him, envisaging how in the dawn on the beach she would be the one to pounce on the brooch half-​hidden by some stone, and thus herself be included among the sailors and adventurers.  But what did he reply to her offer?  She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, " Let  

me come with you, " and he laughed.  He meant yes or no -- either perhaps.  But it was not his meaning --

it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care.  He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity.  It scorched her, and Lily, looking at Minta, being charming to Mr. Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for her exposed to these fangs, and was thankful.

For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation.

She was saved from that dilution.  She would move the tree rather more to the middle.

     Such was the complexity of things.  For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one;

that's what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now.  It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem's (Paul's was exquisite)  into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.

Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses;

and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this -- love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.  Well then, well then? she asked, somehow expecting the others to go on with the argument, as if in an argument like this one threw one's own little bolt which fell short obviously and left the others to carry it on.  So she listened again to what they were saying in case they should throw any light upon the question of love.

     “Then,” said Mr. Bankes, “ there is that liquid the English call coffee. ”

     “Oh, coffee!” said Mrs. Ramsay.  But it was much rather a question (she was thoroughly roused, Lily could see, and talked very emphatically) of real butter and clean milk.  Speaking with warmth and eloquence, she described the iniquity of the English dairy system, and in what state milk was delivered at the door, and was about to prove her charges, for she had gone into the matter, when all round the table, beginning with Andrew in the middle, like a fire leaping from tuft to tuft of furze, her children  

laughed; her husband laughed; she was laughed at fire-​encircled, and forced to veil her crest, dismount her batteries, and only retaliate by displaying the raillery and ridicule of the table to Mr. Bankes as an example of what one suffered if one attacked the prejudices of the British Public.

     Purposely, however, for she had it on her mind that Lily, who had helped her with Mr. Tansley, was out of things, she exempted her from the rest; said “Lily anyhow agrees with me,” and so drew her in a little fluttered, a little startled.  (For she was thinking about love.)  They were both out of things, Mrs.

Ramsay had been thinking, both Lily and Charles Tansley.  Both suffered from the glow of the other two.  He, it was clear, felt himself utterly in the cold; no woman would look at him with Paul Rayley in the room.  Poor fellow!  Still, he had his dissertation the influence of somebody upon something: he could take care of himself.  With Lily it was different.

She faded, under Minta's glow; became more inconspicuous than ever, in her little grey dress with her little puckered face and her little Chinese eyes.  Everything about her was so small.  Yet thought Mrs. Ramsay, comparing her with Minta as she claimed her help (for Lily should bear her out she talked no more about her dairies than her husband did about his boots -- he would talk  

by the hour about his boots) of the two, Lily at forty will be the better.  There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own which Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed but no man would, she feared.  Obviously, not unless it were a much older man, like William Bankes.