THE WINDOWwith difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.

The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staringwhite. She would not have considered it honest totamper with the bright violet and the staring white,since she saw them like that, fashionable though itwas, since Mr. Paunceforte’s visit, to see everythingpale, elegant, semi-transparent. Then beneath the col-our there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly,so commandingly, when she looked: it was when shetook her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.It was in that moment’s flight between the picture andher canvas that the demons set on her who oftenbrought her to the verge of tears and made this pas-sage from conception to work as dreadful as any downa dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself— struggling against terrific odds to maintain hercourage; to say: 'But this is what I see; this is what Isee’, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of hervision to her breast, which a thousand forces didtheir best to pluck from her. And it was then too, inthat chill and windy way, as she began to paint, thatthere forced themselves upon her other things, herown inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house forher father off the Brompton Road, and had much adoto control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heavenshe had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay’s kneeand say to her — but what could one say to her?‘I’m in love with you?’ No, that was not true. ‘I’m inlove with this all’, waving her hand at the hedge, atthe house, at the children? It was absurd, it was im-possible. One could not say what one meant. So nowshe laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side,and said to William Bankes:25
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