Slide to View Image: Opacity 0%
 
THE WINDOWwhich was in the towels too, gritty with sand frombathing.

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, holdingJames by the hand, since he would not go with theothers. It seemed to her such nonsense—inventingdifferences, when people, heaven knows, weredifferent enough without that. The real differ-ences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough. She had inmind at the moment, rich and poor, high and low;the great in birth receiving from her, some halfgrudgingly, half respect, for had she not in her veinsthe blood of that very noble, if slightly mythical,Italian house, whose daughters, scattered aboutEnglish drawing-rooms in the nineteenth century,had lisped so charmingly, had stormed so wildly,and all her wit and her bearing and her temper camefrom them, and not from the sluggish English, or thecold Scotch; but more profoundly, she ruminatedthe other problem, of rich and poor, and the thingsshe saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or inLondon, when she visited this widow, or thatstruggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and17