TO THE LIGHTHOUSEsaw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby.Their entrails, as Andrew said the other day, wereall over the floor; but then what was the point,she asked herself, of buying good chairs to letthem spoil up here all through the winter whenthe house, with only one old woman to see toit, positively dripped with wet? Never mind:the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny; thechildren loved it; it did her husband good tobe three thousand, or if she must be accurate,three hundred miles from his library and hislectures and his disciples; and there was roomfor visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts ofchairs and tables whose London life of servicewas done—they did well enough here; and aphotograph or two, and books. Books, shethought, grew of themselves. She never hadtime to read them. Alas! even the books thathad been given her, and inscribed by the handof the poet himself: “For her whose wishesmust be obeyed" . . . "The happier Helen ofour days" . . . disgraceful to say, she hadnever read them. And Croom on the Mindand Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia(“My dear, stand still," she said)—neither ofthose could one send to the Lighthouse. At acertain moment, she supposed, the house wouldbecome so shabby that something must be46
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