She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, itwas infinitely bad! She could have done it differentlyof course; the colour could have been thinned andfaded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunce-forte would have seen it. But then she did not seeit like that. She saw the colour burning on a frame-work of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying uponthe arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a fewrandom marks scrawled upon the canvas remained.And it would never be seen; never be hung even,and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear,‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write . . .'

She now remembered what she had been goingto say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know howshe would have put it; but it would have been some-thing critical. She had been annoyed the other nightby some highhandedness. Looking along the level ofMr. Bankes’ glance at her, she thought that no wo-man could worship another woman in the way he wor-shipped; they could only seek shelter under theshade Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Look-ing along his beam she added to it her different ray,thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest ofpeople (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; butalso, different too from the perfect shape which onesaw there. But why different, and how different? sheasked herself, scraping her palette of all those moundsof blue and green which seemed to her like clods withno life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspirethem, force them to move, flow, do her bidding to-59