She was silent always. She knew then—

she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, 11

natural y, this swoop and fal of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustained—

falsely perhaps.

(”Nature has but little clay,” said Mr Bankes once, much moved by her voice on the telephone, though she was only tel ing him a fact about a train, “like that of which she moulded you.” He saw her at the end of the line Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face. Yes, he would catch the 10:30 at Euston.

“But she’s no more aware of her beauty than a child,” said Mr Bankes, replacing the receiver and crossing the room to see what progress the workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the back of his house. And he thought of Mrs Ramsay as he looked at that stir among the unfinished wal s. For always, he thought, there was something incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She clapped a deerstalker’s hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in galoshes to snatch a child from mischief. So that if it was her beauty merely that one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing (they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them), and work it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy—she did not like admiration—or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and al that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like other people, insignificant. He did not know. He did not know. He must go to his work.)

Knitting her reddish-brown hairy stocking, with her head outlined absurdly by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo, Mrs Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a moment before, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead. “Let us find another picture to cut out,” she said. 6

But what had happened?

Some one had blundered.

Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. “Some one had blundered”—Fixing her short-sighted eyes upon her husband, who was now bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had happened, some one had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what. He shivered; he quivered. Al his vanity, al his satisfaction in his own splendour, riding fel as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his men through the val ey of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shel , boldly we rode and wel , flashed through the val ey of death, vol eyed and thundered—straight into Lily Briscoe and Wil iam Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.

Not for the world would she have spoken to him, realising, from the familiar signs, his eyes averted, and some curious gathering together of his person, as if he wrapped himself about and needed privacy into which to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband, and, as she watched him chalk yel ow the white dress shirt of a gentleman in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue, thought what a delight it would be to her should he turn out a great artist; and why should he not? He had a splendid forehead. Then, looking up, as her husband passed her once more, she was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm, so that when stopping deliberately, as his turn came round again, at the window he bent quizzical y and whimsical y to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something, she twitted him for having dispatched “that poor young man,” Charles Tansley. Tansley had had to go in and write his dissertation, he said.

12

“James wil have to write HIS dissertation one of these days,” he added ironical y, flicking his sprig.