(For he liked Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly.) It was for that reason, he said, that the young don't read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he preach to us? was what Mr. Bankes understood that young people said nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind.

Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion  

one liked Mr. Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger ached the whole world must come to an end. It was not that# she minded. For who could be deceived by him?  He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.

“A bit of a hypocrite?” Mr. Bankes suggested looking too at Mr. Ramsay's back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam refusing to give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls and his own house, full of comfort, but, since his wife's death, quiet rather? Of course, he had his work.... All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was, as he said, “ a bit of a hypocrite. ”

Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes looking up, looking down. Looking up, there he was -- Mr. Ramsay -- advancing towards them, swinging careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated. Oh, no -- the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best; but, looking down she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely for only so could she keep steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called “being in love” flooded them.

They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them;

the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr.

Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs.

Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something criticising Mrs. Ramsay how she was alarming, too, in her way, high-​handed or words to that effect, when Mr. Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture.

For such it was considering his age, turned sixty and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him.

For him to gaze as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs.

Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs.

Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the  

love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr. Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants , that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.

Such a rapture -- for by what other name could one call it? -- made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of importance; something about Mrs. Ramsay.