THE WINDOW
Lighthouse. He looked into the hedge, into its
intricacy, its darkness.
Always, Mrs. Ramsay felt, one helped oneself
out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some
little odd or end, some sound, some sight. She
listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over;
the children were in their baths; there was only
the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting; she
held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling
in her hands a moment. She saw the light
again. With some irony in her interrogation,
for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed,
she looked at the steady light, the pitiless,
the remorseless, which was so much her, yet
so little her, which had her at its beck and
call (she woke in the night and saw it bent
across their bed, stroking the floor), but for
all that she thought, watching it with fascination,
hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver
fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose
bursting would flood her with delight, she had
known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense
happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little
more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue
went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of
pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke
upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her
eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the
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