На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

Prue must be beautiful, he thought, and Andrew must have brains.

While he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all), he commiserated Ramsay, envied him. But what, for example, did this Lily Briscoe think?

“Oh, but,” said Lily, “think of his work!”

Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s. She asked him what his father’s books were about.

“Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew said.

She said,

“Oh, I don’t understand what that means”.

“Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.”

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table.

Mr. Bankes was glad that she had asked him “to think of his work.” He had thought of it, often and often.

“Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are forty.

He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty. But the number of men who make a definite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small, he said.

How to judge people, how to think of them? She was standing by the pear tree. You have greatness, but Mr. Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical. He is spoilt; he is a tyrant. But he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles.

5

“And even if it isn’t fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay, glancing at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, “it will be another day. And now, James, stand up, and let me measure your leg,”

William and Lily must marry – she took the stocking, and measured it against James’s leg.

“My dear, stand still,” she said.

She looked up and saw the room, saw the chairs. They were fearfully shabby. But what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs? The rent was low; the children loved the house. It is very good for her husband to be three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables; and a photograph or two, and books. She never had time to read them.