210 TO THE LIGHTHOUSEflowers with which she went. Lily squeezed hertubes again. She attacked that problem of thehedge. It was strange how clearly she saw her, step-ping with her usual quickness across fields amongwhose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers,hyacinths or lilies, she vanished. It was some trickof the painter’s eye. For days after she had heardof her death she had seen her thus, putting herwreath to her forehead and going unquestioninglywith her companion, a shadow, across the fields.The sight, the phrase, had its power to console.Wherever she happened to be, painting, here, in thecountry, or in London, the vision would come to her,and her eyes, half closing, sought something to baseher vision on. She looked down the railway car-riage, the omnibus; took a line from shoulder orcheek; looked at the windows opposite; at Picca-dilly, lamp—strung in the evening. All had been partof the fields of death. But always something—itmight be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying Standard,News—thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, re-quired and got in the end an effort of attention, sothat the vision must be perpetually remade. Nowagain, moved as she was by some instinctive need ofdistance and blue, she looked at the bay beneath her,making hillocks of the blue bars of the waves, andstony fields of the purpler spaces. Again she wasroused as usual by something incongruous. Therewas a brown spot in the middle of the bay. It wasa boat. Yes, she realized that after a second. Butwhose boat? Mr Ramsay’s boat, she replied. MrRamsay; the man who had marched past her, withhis hand raised, aloof, at the head of a procession,
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