TO THE LIGHTHOUSEfor eternity. You have greatness, she continued, butMr. Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain,egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs.Ramsay to death; but he has what you (she addressedMr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knowsnothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children.He has eight. You have none. Did he not come downin two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trimhis hair into a pudding basin? All of this danced upand down, like a company of gnats, each separate, butall marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net— danced up and down in Lily's mind, in and aboutthe branches of the pear tree, where still hung in effigythe scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profoundrespect for Mr. Ramsay’s mind, until her thoughtwhich had spun quicker and quicker exploded of itsown intensity; she felt released; a shot went off closeat hand, and there came, flying from its fragments,frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings.

'Jasper!’ said Mr. Bankes. They turned the way thestarlings flew, over the terrace. Following the scatterof swift-flying birds in the sky they stepped throughthe gap in the high hedge straight into Mr. Ramsay,who boomed tragically at them, ‘Someone had blun-dered!’

His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragicintensity, met theirs for a second, and trembled on theverge of recognition; but then, raising his hand half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agonyof peevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he beggedthem to withhold for a moment what he knew to beinevitable, as if he impressed upon them his own child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the mo-32
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