TO THE LIGHTHOUSEswallows for the south, the artichokes for the sun,turning her infallibly to the human race, making hernest in its heart. And this, like all instincts, was alittle distressing to people who did not share it; toMr. Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Somenotion was in both of them about the ineffectivenessof action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was areproach to them, gave a different twist to the world,so that they were led to protest, seeing their own pre-possessions disappear, and clutch at them vanishing.Charles Tansley did that too: it was part of the reasonwhy one disliked him. He upset the proportions ofone’s world. And what had happened to him, shewondered, idly stirring the plantains with her brush.He had got his fellowship. He had married; he livedat Golder’s Green.

She had gone one day into a Hall and heard himspeaking during the war. He was denouncing some-thing: he was condemning somebody. He was preach-ing brotherly love. And all she felt was how couldhe love his kind who did not know one picture fromanother, who had stood behind her smoking shag(‘fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe’) and making it hisbusiness to tell her women can’t write, women can’tpaint, not so much that he believed it, as that forsome odd reason he wished it? There he was, lean andred and raucous, preaching love from a platform(there were ants crawling about among the plantainswhich she disturbed with her brush — red, energeticants, rather like Charles Tansley). She had looked athim ironically from her seat in the half-empty hall,pumping love into that chilly space, and suddenly,there was the old cask or whatever it was bobbing up228

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