THE WINDOW

Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight sons anddaughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sought their bed-rooms, their fastnesses in a house where there wasno other privacy to debate anything, everything;Tansley’s tie; the passsing of the Reform Bill; sea-birds and butterflies; people; while the sun pouredinto those attics, which a plank alone separated fromeach other so that every footstep could be plainlyheard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father whowas dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, andlit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots,beetles, and the skulls of small birds, while it drewfrom the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to thewall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in thetowels too, gritty with sand from bathing.

Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudicestwisted into the very fibre of being, oh that theyshould begin so early, Mrs. Ramsay deplored. Theywere so critical, her children. They talked such non-sense. She went from the dining-room, holding Jamesby the hand, since he would not go with the others.It seemed to her such nonsense — inventing differ-ences, when people, heaven knows, were differentenough without that. The real differences, she thought,standing by the drawing-room window, are enough,quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, richand poor, high and low; the great in birth receivingfrom her, half grudging, some respect, for had shenot in her veins the blood of that very noble, ifslightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters,scattered about English drawing-rooms in the nine-teenth century, had lisped so charmingly, stormed13
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