THE LIGHTHOUSE 181placed itself white and uncompromising directlybefore her. It seemed to rebuke her with its coldstare for all this hurry and agitation; this folly andwaste of emotion; it drastically recalled her andspread through her mind first a peace, as her dis-orderly sensations (he had gone and she had been sosorry for him and she had said nothing) trooped offthe field; and then emptiness. She looked blanklyat the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare;from the canvas to the garden. There was some-thing (she stood screwing up her little Chinese eyesin her small puckered face), something she remem-bered in the relations of those lines cutting across,slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with itsgreen cave of blues and browns, which had stayedin her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind sothat at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as shewalked along the Brompton Road, as she brushedher hair, she found herself painting that picture, pass-ing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagina-tion. But there was all the difference in the worldbetween this planning airily away from the canvas,and actually taking her brush and making the firstmark.

She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation atMr Ramsay’s presence, and her easel, rammed intothe earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle. Andnow that she had put that right, and in so doing hadsubdued the impertinences and irrelevances thatplucked her attention and made her remember howshe was such and such a person, had such and suchrelations to people, she took her hand and raised her

brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful

G 949

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