TO THE LIGHTHOUSEyoungest, her cherished? — and saw the room, saw thechairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their entrails,as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor;but then what was the point, she asked herself, ofbuying good chairs to let them spoil up here allthrough the winter when the house, with only one oldwoman to see to it, positively dripped with wet? Nevermind: the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny; thechildren loved it; it did her husband good to be threethousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundredmiles from his library and his lectures and his disciples;and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds,crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life ofservice was done — they did well enough here; and aphotograph or two, and books. Books, she thought,grew of themselves. She never had time to read them.Alas! even the books that had been given her, and in-scribed by the hand of the poet himself: ‘For her whosewishes must be obeyed’. . . ‘The happier Helen of ourdays’. . . disgraceful to say, she had never read them.And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the SavageCustoms of Polynesia (‘My dear, stand still,’ she said)— neither of those could one send to the Lighthouse.At a certain moment, she supposed, the house wouldbecome so shabby that something must be done. Ifthey could be taught to wipe their feet and not bringthe beach in with them — that would be something.Crabs, she had to allow, if Andrew really wished todissect them, or if Jasper believed that one could makesoup from seaweed, one could not prevent it; or Rose’sobjects — shells, reeds, stones; for they were gifted,her children, but all in quite different ways. And theresult of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room34
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