На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

He was filled with her words, like a child. At last, he looked at her with humble gratitude and went away.

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another. She felt the rapture of successful creation. Every throb of this pulse enclosed her and her husband, and gave to each some solace.

A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmichael’s shadow. Mr. Carmichael was in his yellow slippers.

She asked,

“Going indoors Mr. Carmichael?”

8

He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained his beard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that the poor man was unhappy. He came to them every year as an escape. Every year she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said,

“I am going to the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?”

And she felt him wince. He did not trust her. It was because of his wife.

She remembered that iniquity of his wife’s towards him. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat. He had the tiresomeness of an old man. His wife said, in her odious way,

“Now, Mrs. Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together.”

Mrs. Ramsay could see the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? She made him suffer.

And always now he shrank from her. He never told her anything. But what more can she do? He has a sunny room.

The children are good to him. It injured her that he shrinks. Everybody loved her. Everybody needed her. How could he not? When Mr. Carmichael just nodded to her question, with a book beneath his arm, she felt that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, “O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay… Mrs.