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“Yes,” Mr. Bankes said. “It is pity. It is pity that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people.”

For he liked Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly. It was for that reason, he said, that the young people don’t read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold. Why will he preach to us?

Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But she liked Mr. Ramsay. He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him. His little dodges deceived nobody. It was not THAT she minded. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness.

“A hypocrite?” Mr. Bankes suggested.

He looked at Mr. Ramsay’s back. He rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was, as he said, “a hypocrite.”

Lily Briscoe was putting away her brushes. She was looking up, looking down. Looking up, there he was – Mr. Ramsay was advancing towards them. He was swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. “A hypocrite?” she repeated. Oh, no – the most sincere of men, the truest, the best. But he is absorbed in himself. He is tyrannical, he is unjust.

Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something about Mrs. Ramsay, how she was alarming, but then she saw the rapture with which Mr. Bankes looked at Mrs. Ramsay and the look on his face made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak. Lily felt that this rapture was equivalent to the loves of dozens of young men. Perhaps Mrs. Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men. It was distilled and filtered love; love that never attempted to clutch its object. This love was spread over the world and became part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world shared it.

Such a rapture made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she wanted to say. It was nothing of importance; something about Mrs. Ramsay. It paled beside this “rapture”, this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude. Nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift.

People can love like this. She wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag. Then she looked at her picture.

She nearly wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! Nobody will look at it, nobody will even hang it. Mr. Tansley was whispering in her ear,

“Women can’t paint, women can’t write.”

She now remembered what she wanted say about Mrs. Ramsay. She was annoyed by some highhandedness. She thought of Mr. Bankes. She thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped. Mrs. Ramsay was unquestionably the loveliest of people; the best perhaps; but also, different. But why different, and how different? she asked herself. She scraped her palette of all those mounds of blue and green. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her? She was like a bird, an arrow. She was willful; she was commanding. She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. The house was full of children.

Oh, but there was her father; her home; even her painting. But all this seemed so little, so virginal, against the other. She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself.

Lily Briscoe looked up at last. She saw Mrs. Ramsay, still presiding.

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty? Did she lock up within her some secret? She was sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees. She was smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure. She imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman were tablets with sacred inscriptions. What was the key to those secret chambers? Can love, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? It was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge. And she put her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart. Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs. Ramsay went. A ray passed Mr. Bankes’s eyes. He put on his spectacles. He stepped back. He raised his hand. He slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,

Lily winced like a dog that sees a hand raised to strike it. Mr. Bankes was less alarming than another.

Mr. Bankes took out a pen-knife and tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, “just there”? he asked.

It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said.

Mother and child are the objects of universal veneration. The mother was famous for her beauty. But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in this sense. There were other senses too.

A picture must be a tribute. A mother and child can be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a shadow there. He considered. He was interested. The truth was that all his prejudices were on the other side, he explained. The largest picture in his drawing-room was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks of the Kennet. He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet, he said. Lily must come and see that picture, he said.