Slide to View Image: Opacity 0%
 
THE WINDOW 113drew with them into visibility the long table entire,and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit.What had she done with it, Mrs Ramsay wondered,for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, ofthe horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made herthink of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea,of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs withvine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in somepicture), among the leopard skins and the torcheslolloping red and gold. . . .Thus brought up sud-denly into the light it seemed possessed of great size

and depth, was like a world in which one could take

one's staff and climb up hills, she thought, and go

down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it broughtthem into sympathy momentarily) she saw thatAugustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate offruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tasselhere, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. Thatwas his way of looking, different from hers. Butlooking together united them.

Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on bothsides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twi-light, into a party round a table, for the night wasnow shut off by panes of glass, which, far from givingany accurate view of the outside world, rippled it sostrangely that here, inside the room, seemed to beorder and dry land; there, outside, a reflection inwhich things wavered and vanished, waterily.

Some change at once went through them all, as ifthis had really happened, and they were all consciousof making a party together in a hollow, on an island;had their common cause against that fluidity out