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palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely impersonal; it said something about death; it said very
little about love. There was an impersonality about him. He wanted very little of other people. Had
he not always lurched rather awkwardly past the drawing-room window with some newspaper
under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs Ramsay whom for some reason he did not much like? On that
account, of course, she would always try to make him stop. He would bow to her. He would halt
unwillingly and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did not want anything of her, Mrs Ramsay would
ask him (Lily could hear her) wouldn't he like a coat, a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing.
(Here he bowed.) There was some quality in her which he did not much like. It was perhaps her
masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-fact in her. She was so direct.
(A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room window--the squeak of a hinge. The light
breeze was toying with the window.)
There must have been people who disliked her very much, Lily thought (Yes; she realised that
the drawing-room step was empty, but it had no effect on her whatever. She did not want Mrs
Ramsay now.)--People who thought her too sure, too drastic.
Also, her beauty offended people probably. How monotonous, they would say, and the same
always! They preferred another type--the dark, the vivacious. Then she was weak with her husband.
She let him make those scenes. Then she was reserved. Nobody knew exactly what had happened
to her. And (to go back to Mr Carmichael and his dislike) one could not imagine Mrs Ramsay
standing painting, lying reading, a whole morning on the lawn. It was unthinkable. Without saying
a word, the only token of her errand a basket on her arm, she went off to the town, to the poor, to sit
in some stuffy little bedroom. Often and often Lily had seen her go silently in the midst of some
game, some discussion, with her basket on her arm, very upright. She had noted her return. She had
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thought, half laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups), half moved (her beauty took one's
breath away), eyes that are closing in pain have looked on you. You have been with them there.
And then Mrs Ramsay would be annoyed because somebody was late, or the butter not fresh, or
the teapot chipped. And all the time she was saying that the butter was not fresh one would be
thinking of Greek temples, and how beauty had been with them there in that stuffy little room. She
never talked of it--she went, punctually, directly. It was her instinct to go, an instinct like the
swallows for the south, the artichokes for the sun, turning her infallibly to the human race, making
her nest in its heart. And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing to people who did not share it;
to Mr Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them about the
ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was a reproach to them, gave a
different twist to the world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessions
disappear, and clutch at them vanishing. Charles Tansley did that too: it was part of the reason why
one disliked him. He upset the proportions of one's world. And what had happened to him, she
wondered, idly stirring the platains with her brush. He had got his fellowship. He had married; he
lived at Golder's Green.
She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during the war. He was denouncing
something: he was condemning somebody. He was preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was
how could he love his kind who did not know one picture from another, who had stood behind her
smoking shag ("fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe") and making it his business to tell her women
can't write, women can't paint, not so much that he believed it, as that for some odd reason he
wished it? There he was lean and red and raucous, preaching love from a platform (there were ants
crawling about among the plantains which she disturbed with her brush--red, energetic, shiny ants,
rather like Charles Tansley). She had looked at him ironically from her seat in the half-empty hall,
pumping love into that chilly space, and suddenly, there was the old cask or whatever it was
bobbing up and down among the waves and Mrs Ramsay looking for her spectacle case among the
pebbles. "Oh, dear! What a nuisance! Lost again. Don't bother, Mr Tansley. I lose thousands every
summer," at which he pressed his chin back against his collar, as if afraid to sanction such
exaggeration, but could stand it in her whom he liked, and smiled very charmingly. He must have
confided in her on one of those long expeditions when people got separated and walked back alone.
He was educating his little sister, Mrs Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own
idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains with her brush. Half one's notions
of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own. He did for her
instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of
temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she had to help herself to Mrs Ramsay's sayings, to
look at him through her eyes.
She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of
indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that.
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