49Perhaps you will wake up & find the sun shining & the birds singing,said Mrs. Ramsay, half mechanically, smoothing the little boyshair, & in order to for her husband had completely dashed hispleasure, she happ spirits, she could see: 'going to the lighthouse'having been his being his a passion of his, which, perhaps foolishlyshe had let him think would be gratified tomorrow. But now - itwas very annoying - her husband threw cold water on it; & thenstill furthersaid that itwould rain;Mr. Tansley went & rubbed it in, which was quite unnecessary forJames was quick enough to understanding,at& all she could do nowwas to admire the refrigerator which he had cut out, & toturn the pages of the list in the hope that she might findsomething very difficult - like a mowing machine - which with itslong handles would want extraordinary skl skill.Allthese young men parodied her husband, she reflected. If he said it wasgoing to rain, they said it would be a positive tornado.But her ser search for mowing machines was momentarilyTheinterrupted. That gruff murmur the terse question, the s hortbyanswer, which often unnaturally broken into by thepuffs at their pipes, represented to her, sitting in the windowwhich opened onto the terrace, the men talking; the sound whichhad now lasted half an hour & taken its place in her scale ofperception withthe tap of balls upon cricket bats, thesharp sudden bark now &then "Hows that?" & the& the regular monotonous thud of the waves on the beach, of thethat sound which on a still night became almost ominous in itsonethunder its persistency & made one think of the destructionengulfingfinal engulfof this si island & its absorptionfinally into the sea,to& often beat the most measured & soothing tattoo to herthoughts, & sometimes seemed to her consolingly thatnothing as if it repeated over & over again[?]the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature,who, in her cosmogony, had long supplanted forreasons she could scarcely name, the hierarchy of Heaven,needily?frombay