TO THE LIGHTHOUSEher, stepping with her usual quickness across fieldsamong whose folds, purplish and soft, among whoseflowers, hyacinths or lilies, she vanished. It wassome trick of the painter’s eye. For days after shehad heard of her death she had seen her thus, puttingher wreath to her forehead and going unquestion-ingly with her companion, a shade across the fields.The sight, the phrase, had its power to console.Wherever she happened to be, painting, here, inthe country or in London, the vision would cometo her, and her eyes, half closing, sought somethingto base her vision on. She looked down the railwaycarriage, the omnibus; took a line from shoulderor cheek; looked at the windows opposite; at Pic-cadilly, lamp-strung in the evening. All had beenpart of the fields of death. But always something—itmight be a face, a voice, a paper boy cryingStandard, News—thrust through, snubbed her,waked her, required and got in the end an effortof attention, so that the vision must be perpetuallyremade. Now again, moved as she was by someinstinctive need of distance and blue, she lookedat the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the bluebars of the waves, and stony fields of the purplerspaces, again she was roused as usual by somethingincongruous. There was a brown spot in the middleof the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after270
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