THE LIGHTHOUSEed, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further andfurther from us. Mockingly she seemed to see herthere at the end of the corridor of years saying, of allincongruous things, ‘Marry, marry!’ (sitting veryupright early in the morning with the birds beginningto cheep in the garden outside). And one would haveto say to her, It has all gone against your wishes.They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life haschanged completely. At that all her being, even herbeauty, became, for a moment, dusty and out of date.For a moment Lily, standing there, with the sun hoton her back, summing up the Rayleys, triumphed overMrs. Ramsay, who would never know how Paul wentto coffee-houses and had a mistress; how he sat onthe ground and Minta handed him his tools; how shestood here painting, had never married, not even Wil-liam Bankes.

Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived,she would have compelled it. Already that summerhe was ‘the kindest of men’. He was ‘the first scientistof his age, my husband says’. He was also ‘poor Wil-liam — it makes me so unhappy, when I go to seehim, to find nothing nice in his house — no one toarrange the flowers’. So they were sent for walks to-gether, and she was told, with that faint touch ofirony that made Mrs. Ramsay slip through one’s fin-gers, that she had a scientific mind; she liked flowers;she was so exact. What was this mania of hers for mar-riage? Lily wondered, stepping to and fro from hereasel.

(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky,a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind, coveringPaul Rayley, issuing from him. It rose like a fire203

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