THE WINDOWthem out, however, with a self-consciousness that madeher wince. ‘Let us go to the Circus.' No. He could notsay it right. He could not feel it right. But why not?she wondered. What was wrong with him then? Sheliked him warmly, at the moment. Had they not beentaken, she asked, to circuses when they were children?Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing hewanted to reply to; had been longing all these days tosay, how they did not go to circuses. It was a largefamily, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was aworking man; ‘My father is a chemist, Mrs. Ramsay.He keeps a shop.’ He himself had paid his own waysince he was thirteen. Often he went without a great-coat in winter. He could never ‘return hospitality’(those were his parched stiff words) at college. He hadto make things last twice the time other people did;he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same theold men smoked on the quays. He worked hard —seven hours a day; his subject was now the influence ofsomething upon somebody — they were walking onand Mrs. Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning,only the words, here and there . . . dissertation . . . fel-lowship. . . readership . . . lectureship. She could notfollow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself offso glibly, but said to herself that she saw now whygoing to the circus had knocked him off his perch,poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, withall that about his father and mother and brothers andsisters, and she would see to it that they didn’t laughat him any more; she would tell Prue about it. Whathe would have liked, she supposed, would have beento say how he had been to Ibsen with the Ramsays.He was an awful prig — oh yes, an insufferable bore.172 - L.
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