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72 TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

In a moment he would ask her: ‘Are we going tothe Lighthouse?' And she would have to say: 'No:not to-morrow; your father says not.’ Happily,Mildred came in to fetch them, and the bustle dis-tracted them. But he kept looking back over hisshoulder as Mildred carried him out, and she wascertain that he was thinking, we are not going to theLighthouse to-morrow; and she thought, he willremember that all his life.

IINo, she thought, putting together some of thepictures he had cut out—a refrigerator, a mowingmachine, a gentleman in evening dress—childrennever forget. For this reason it was so importantwhat one said, and what one did, and it was a reliefwhen they went to bed. For now she need not thinkabout anybody. She could be herself, by herself.And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to bealone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glit-tering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with asense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shapedcore of darkness, something invisible to others.Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, itwas thus that she felt herself; and this self havingshed its attachments was free for the strangest ad-ventures. When life sank down for a moment, therange of experience seemed limitless. And to every-body there was always this sense of unlimited re-sources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily,Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, thethings you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath