TO THE LIGHTHOUSEclearly before her a large kitchen table. It was An-drew’s doing. She asked him what his father’s bookswere about. ‘Subject and object and the nature ofreality,’ Andrew had said. And when she said Hea-vens, she had no notion what that meant. ‘Think ofa kitchen table then,’ he told her, ‘when you’re notthere.’

So she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ram-say’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now inthe fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the or-chard. And with a painful effort of concentration, shefocused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark ofthe tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon aphantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed boardtables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems tohave been laid bare by years of muscular integrity,which stuck there, its four legs in air. Naturally, ifone’s days were passed in this seeing of angular es-sences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all theirflamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white dealfour-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest mindsso to do), naturally one could not be judged like anordinary person.

Mr. Bankes liked her for bidding him ‘think of hiswork’. He had thought of it, often and often. Timeswithout number, he had said, ‘Ramsay is one of thosemen who do their best work before they are forty’.He had made a definite contribution to philosophy inone little book when he was only five and twenty;what came after was more or less amplification, repe-tition. But the number of men who make a definitecontribution to anything whatsoever is very small, hesaid, pausing by the pear tree, well brushed, scrupu-30
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