Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her withhis hands waving shouting out, "Boldly we rode and well," but, mercifully,he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed uponthe heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and soalarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she wassafe; he would not stand still and look at her picture. And that was whatLily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass,at the line, at the colour, at Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window withJames, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creepup, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at. But now, withall her senses quickened as they were, looking, straining, till the colour ofthe wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes, she was aware ofsomeone coming out of the house, coming towards her; but somehow divined,from the footfall, William Bankes, so that though her brushquivered, she did not, as she would have done had it been Mr Tansley,Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, or practically anybody else, turn her canvasupon the grass, but let it stand. William Bankes stood beside her.

　　They had rooms in the village, and so, walking in, walking out, partinglate on door-mats, had said little things about the soup, about thechildren, about one thing and another which made them allies; so thatwhen he stood beside her now in his judicial way (he was old enough tobe her father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very scrupulousand clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes wereexcellent, he observed. They allowed the toes their natural expansion.

　　Lodging in the same house with her, he had noticed too, how orderly shewas, up before breakfast and off to paint, he believed, alone: poor, presumably,and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doylecertainly, but with a good sense which made her in his eyes superior tothat young lady. Now, for instance, when Ramsay bore down on them,shouting, gesticulating, Miss Briscoe, he felt certain, understood.

　　Some one had blundered.

　　Mr Ramsay glared at them. He glared at them without seeming to seethem. That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable. Together theyhad seen a thing they had not been meant to see. They had encroachedupon a privacy. So, Lily thought, it was probably an excuse of his formoving, for getting out of earshot, that made Mr Bankes almost immediatelysay something about its being chilly and suggested taking a stroll.

　　She would come, yes. But it was with difficulty that she took her eyes offher picture.

　　The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would nothave considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staringwhite, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since MrPaunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent.

　　Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all soclearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took herbrush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment'sflight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on herwho often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage fromconception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.

　　Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintainher courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so toclasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousandforces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in thatchill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselvesupon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keepinghouse for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to controlher impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resistedso far) at Mrs Ramsay's knee and say to her—but what could one say toher? "I'm in love with you?" No, that was not true. "I'm in love with thisall," waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It wasabsurd, it was impossible. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box,side by side, and said to William Bankes:

　　"It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat," she said, lookingabout her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green,the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooksdropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved, flashed,turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle ofSeptember, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down thegarden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampasgrass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot pokers likebrasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the baylooked bluer than ever.

　　They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It wasas if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnanton dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief.

　　First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expandedwith it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checkedand chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up behindthe great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, sothat one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountainof white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on thepale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and againsmoothly, a film of mother of pearl.

　　They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity,excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailingboat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; letits sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture,after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes faraway, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distantviews seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer andto be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely atrest.

　　Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay:

　　thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along aroad by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be hisnatural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered(and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddlingher wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon whichRamsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said "Pretty—pretty," an odd illuminationin to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity,his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if theirfriendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsayhad married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp hadgone out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only,after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeatthat they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintainedthat his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there,like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the redfresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality, laid upacross the bay among the sandhills.

　　He was anxious for the sake of this friendship and perhaps too in orderto clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having driedand shrunk—for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankeswas childless and a widower—he was anxious that Lily Briscoe shouldnot disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understandhow things stood between them. Begun long years ago, theirfriendship had petered out on a Westmorland road, where the henspread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married,and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for noone's fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat.

　　Yes. That was it. He finished. He turned from the view. And, turningto walk back the other way, up the drive, Mr Bankes was alive to thingswhich would not have struck him had not those sandhills revealed tohim the body of his friendship lying with the red on its lips laid up inpeat—for instance, Cam, the little girl, Ramsay's youngest daughter. Shewas picking Sweet Alice on the bank. She was wild and fierce. Shewould not "give a flower to the gentleman" as the nursemaid told her.

　　No! no! no! she would not! She clenched her fist. She stamped. And MrBankes felt aged and saddened and somehow put into the wrong by herabout his friendship. He must have dried and shrunk.

　　The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed tocontrive it all. Eight children! To feed eight children on philosophy! Herewas another of them, Jasper this time, strolling past, to have a shot at abird, he said, nonchalantly, swinging Lily's hand like a pump-handle ashe passed, which caused Mr Bankes to say, bitterly, how SHE was a favourite.

　　There was education now to be considered (true, Mrs Ramsayhad something of her own perhaps) let alone the daily wear and tear ofshoes and stockings which those "great fellows," all well grown, angular,ruthless youngsters, must require. As for being sure which was which, orin what order they came, that was beyond him. He called them privatelyafter the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James theRuthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair—for Prue would have beauty,he thought, how could she help it?—and Andrew brains. While hewalked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped hiscomments (for she was in love with them all, in love with this world) heweighed Ramsay's case, commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seenhim divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity whichcrowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wingsand clucking domesticities. They gave him something—William Bankesacknowledged that; it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck aflower in his coat or clambered over his shoulder, as over her father's, tolook at a picture of Vesuviusin eruption; but they had also, his oldfriends could not but feel, destroyed something. What would a strangerthink now? What did this Lily Briscoe think? Could one help noticingthat habits grew on him? eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was astonishingthat a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he did—butthat was too harsh a phrase—could depend so much as he did uponpeople's praise.

　　"Oh, but," said Lily, "think of his work!"Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before hera large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what hisfather's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of reality,"Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion whatthat meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when you're notthere."So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay's work, ascrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for theyhad reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, shefocused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon itsfish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of thosescrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to havebeen laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its fourlegs in air. Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angularessences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo cloudsand blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a markof the finest minds to do so), naturally one could not be judged like anordinary person.

　　Mr Bankes liked her for bidding him "think of his work." He hadthought of it, often and often. Times without number, he had said,"Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they areforty." He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one littlebook when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more orless amplification, repetition. But the number of men who make a definitecontribution to anything whatsoever is very small, he said, pausingby the pear tree, well brushed, scrupulously exact, exquisitely judicial.

　　Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of heraccumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in aponderous avalanche all she felt about him. That was one sensation.

　　Then up rose in a fume the essence of his being. That was another. Shefelt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity;his goodness. I respect you (she addressed silently him in person) inevery atom; you are not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finerthan Mr Ramsay; you are the finest human being that I know; you haveneither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherishthat loneliness), you live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoesrose before her eyes); praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-hearted, heroic man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he hadbrought a valet all the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; wouldprose for hours (until Mr Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt invegetables and the iniquity of English cooks.

　　How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think ofthem? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was likingone felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, afterall? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressionspoured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was likefollowing a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one'spencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable,everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures andhumps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity.

　　You have greatness, she continued, but Mr Ramsay has none of it. Heis petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears MrsRamsay to death; but he has what you (she addressed Mr Bankes) havenot; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogsand his children. He has eight. Mr Bankes has none. Did he not comedown in two coats the other night and let Mrs Ramsay trim his hair intoa pudding basin? All of this danced up and down, like a company ofgnats, each separate but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elasticnet—danced up and down in Lily's mind, in and about the branches ofthe pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbolof her profound respect for Mr Ramsay's mind, until her thoughtwhich had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity; shefelt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying fromits fragments, frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings.

　　"Jasper!" said Mr Bankes. They turned the way the starlings flew, overthe terrace. Following the scatter of swift-flying birds in the sky theystepped through the gap in the high hedge straight into Mr Ramsay, whoboomed tragically at them, "Some one had blundered!"His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity, met theirsfor a second, and trembled on the verge of recognition; but then, raisinghis hand, half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agony ofpeevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he begged them to withhold for amoment what he knew to be inevitable, as if he impressed upon them hisown child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the moment of discoverywas not to be routed utterly, but was determined to hold fast tosomething of this delicious emotion, this impure rhapsody of which hewas ashamed, but in which he revelled—he turned abruptly, slammedhis private door on them; and, Lily Briscoe and Mr Bankes, looking uneasilyup into the sky, observed that the flock of starlings which Jasperhad routed with his gun had settled on the tops of the elm trees.