Ramsay, sitting down on the bed by her side.  She could see the horns, Cam said all over the room.  It was true.  Wherever they put  

the light (and James could not sleep without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere.

     “But think, Cam, it's only an old pig,” said Mrs.

Ramsay, “ a nice black pig like the pigs at the farm. ”  But Cam thought it was a horrid thing branching at her all over the room.

     “Well then,” said Mrs. Ramsay, “ we will cover it up, ” and they all watched her go to the chest of drawers, and open the little drawers quickly one after another, and not seeing anything that would do, she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam's and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird's nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes and.....  She could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cam's mind, and Cam was repeating after her how it was like a mountain, a bird's nest, a garden, and there were little antelopes, and her eyes were opening and shutting, and Mrs. Ramsay went on speaking still more monotonously, and more rhythmically and more nonsensically, how she must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of mountains and valleys  

and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and gardens, and everything lovely, she said, raising her head very slowly and speaking more and more mechanically, until she sat upright and saw that Cam was asleep.

     Now, she whispered, crossing over to his bed James must go to sleep too, for see, she said, the boar's skull was still there; they had not touched it;

they had done just what he wanted; it was there quite unhurt.  He made sure that the skull was still there under the shawl.  But he wanted to ask her something more.  Would they go to the Lighthouse tomorrow?

     No, not tomorrow, she said, but soon, she promised him; the next fine day.  He was very good.  He lay down.  She covered him up.  But he would never forget, she knew, and she felt angry with Charles Tansley, with her husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes.  Then feeling for her shawl and remembering that she had wrapped it round the boar's skull, she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or two, and heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air and murmured good night to Mildred and left the room and let the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock and went out.

     She hoped he would not bang his books on the  

floor above their heads, she thought, still thinking how annoying Charles Tansley was.  For neither of them slept well; they were excitable children, and since he said things like that about the Lighthouse it seemed to her likely that he would knock a pile of books over, just as they were going to sleep clumsily sweeping them off the table with his elbow.

For she supposed that he had gone upstairs to work.

Yet he looked so desolate; yet she would feel relieved when he went; yet she would see that he was better treated tomorrow; yet he was admirable with her husband; yet his manners certainly wanted improving; yet she liked his laugh -- thinking this as she came downstairs, she noticed that she could now see the moon itself through the staircase window --

the yellow harvest moon -- and turned, and they saw her, standing above them on the stairs.

     “That's my mother,” thought Prue.  Yes; Minta should look at her; Paul Rayley should look at her.

That is the thing itself, she felt, as if there were only one person like that in the world; her mother.

And, from having been quite grown up, a moment before, talking with the others, she became a child again, and what they had been doing was a game and would her mother sanction their game, or condemn it, she wondered.  And thinking what a chance it was for Minta and Paul and Lily to see her, and  

feeling what an extraordinary stroke of fortune it was for her, to have her, and how she would never grow up and never leave home, she said, like a child, “ We thought of going down to the beach to watch the waves. ”

     Instantly, for no reason at all, Mrs. Ramsay became like a girl of twenty, full of gaiety.  A mood of revelry suddenly took possession of her.  Of course they must go; of course they must go, she cried, laughing; and running down the last three or four steps quickly, she began turning from one to the other and laughing and drawing Minta's wrap round her and saying she only wished she could come too, and would they be very late, and had any of them got a watch?

     “Yes, Paul has,” said Minta.  Paul slipped a beautiful gold watch out of a little wash-​leather case to show her.  And as he held it in the palm of his hand before her, he felt, " She knows all about it.

I need not say anything. “  He was saying to her as he showed her the watch, ” I've done it, Mrs. Ramsay.

I owe it all to you. "  And seeing the gold watch lying in his hand, Mrs. Ramsay felt, How extraordinarily lucky Minta is!  She is marrying a man who has a gold watch in a wash-​leather bag!

     “How I wish I could come with you!” she cried.

But she was withheld by something so strong that  

she never even thought of asking herself what it was.

Of course it was impossible for her to go with them.  But she would have liked to go, had it not been for the other thing, and tickled by the absurdity of her thought (how lucky to marry a man with a wash-​leather bag for his watch)  she went with a smile on her lips into the other room, where her husband sat reading.

     Of course, she said to herself, coming into the room she had to come here to get something she wanted.

First she wanted to sit down in a particular chair under a particular lamp.  But she wanted something more, though she did not know, could not think what it was that she wanted. She looked at her husband (taking up her stocking and beginning to knit), and saw that he did not want to be interrupted --

that was clear.  He was reading something that moved him very much.  He was half smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion.  He was tossing the pages over.  He was acting it --   perhaps he was thinking himself the person in the book.

She wondered what book it was.  Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter's she saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the light fell on her knitting.  For  

Charles Tansley had been saying (she looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of books on the floor above), had been saying that people don't read Scott any more.  Then her husband thought “That's what they'll say of me;” so he went and got one of those books.  And if he came to the conclusion “That's true” what Charles Tansley said, he would accept it about Scott.  (She could see that he was weighing, considering, putting this with that as he read.)  But not about himself.  He was always uneasy about himself.  That troubled her.  He would always be worrying about his own books -- will they be read are they good, why aren't they better, what do people think of me?  Not liking to think of him so and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stocking out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.

     It didn't matter, any of it, she thought.  A great man, a great book, fame -- who could tell?  She knew nothing about it.  But it was his way with him, his truthfulness -- for instance at dinner she had been  

thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak!

She had complete trust in him.  And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking There is something I want -- something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.  And she waited a little, knitting, wondering and slowly rose those words they had said at dinner “ the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee, ” began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed; so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book.

And all the lives we ever lived    And all the lives to be    Are full of trees and changing leaves  

she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking.

And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so, she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards shoving her way up under petals that curved over  

her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red.  She did not know at first what the words meant at all.

Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners  

she read and turned the page, swinging herself zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her -- her husband slapping his thighs.  Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other.  They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her.  It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs.  Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say anything; just sit there.  And he went on reading.  His lips twitched.  It filled him.  It fortified him.  He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all.  But now he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z).  Somebody would reach it -- if not he, then another.  This  

man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears.  Raising the book a little to hide his face he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view) forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best)  and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.

  Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as he finished the chapter. He felt that he had been arguing with somebody, and had got the better of him. They could not improve upon that, whatever they might say; and his own position became more secure. The lovers were fiddlesticks, he thought collecting it all in his mind again. That's fiddlesticks that's first-​rate, he thought, putting one thing beside another. But he must read it again. He could not remember the whole shape of the thing. He had to keep his judgement in suspense. So he returned to the other thought -- if young men did not care for  

this, naturally they did not care for him either. One ought not to complain, thought Mr. Ramsay, trying to stifle his desire to complain to his wife that young men did not admire him. But he was determined; he would not bother her again. Here he looked at her reading. She looked very peaceful, reading. He liked to think that every one had taken themselves off and that he and she were alone. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

  Mrs. Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her to wake she would, she really would, but otherwise might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a little longer ? She was climbing up those branches this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another.

  “Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,” she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here -- the sonnet.

  But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her.