THE LIGHTHOUsEa muddle, about something some one had saidabout Christ; a mammoth had been dug up ina London street; what was the great Napoleonlike? Then they took all this with their cleanhands (they wore grey coloured clothes; theysmelt of heather) and they brushed the scrapstogether, turning the paper, crossing their knees,and said something now and then very brief.In a kind of trance she would take a book fromthe shelf and stand there, Watching her fatherwrite, so equally, so neatly from one side of thepage to another, with a little cough now and then,or something said briefly to the other old gentleman opposite. And she thought, standing therewith her book open, here one could let whateverone thought expand like a leaf in water; and if itdid well here, among the old gentlemen smokingand T/ze Times crackling, then it was right. Andwatching her father as he wrote in his study, shethought (now sitting in the boat) he was mostlovable, he was most wise; he was not vain nora tyrant. Indeed, if he saw she was there,reading a book, he would ask her, as gentlyas any one could, Was there nothing he couldgive her?

Lest this should be wrong, she looked at himreading the little book with the»shiny covermottled like a plover’s egg. No; it was right.291