TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

He was not complaining, he said. She knew thathe did not complain. She knew that he had nothingto complain of. And he seized her hand and raised itto his lips and kissed it with an intensity that broughtthe tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.

They turned away from the view and began to walkup the path where the silver-green spear-like plantsgrew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a youngman’s arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, andshe thought with delight how strong he still was,though he was over sixty, and how untamed and opti-mistic, and how strange it was that being convinced,as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to de-press him, but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she re-flected? Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made dif-ferently from other people, born blind, deaf, anddumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinarythings, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understandingoften astonished her. But did he notice the flowers?No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even noticehis own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pud-ding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at tablewith them like a person in a dream. And his habit oftalking aloud, or saying poetry aloud, was growing onhim, she was afraid; for sometimes it was awkward —Best and brightest, come away!poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, al-most jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs. Ramsay,though instantly taking his side against all the sillyGiddingses in the world, then, she thought, intimatingby a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hilltoo fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to84
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