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THE LIGHTHOUSElooked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare; from the canvas to thegarden. There was something (she stood screwing up her little Chinese eyes in her small puckeredface) something she remembered in the relationsof those lines cutting across, slicing down, andin the mass of the hedge with its green cave ofblues and browns, which had stayed in her mind;which had tied a knot in her mind so that at oddsand ends of time, involuntarily, as she walkedalong the Brompton Road, as she brushed herhair, she found herself painting that picture,passing her eye over it, and untying the knot inimagination. But there was all the difference inthe world between this planning airily awayfrom the canvas, and actually taking her brushand making the first mark.
She had taken the wrong brush in her agitationat Mr. Ramsay's.presence, and her easel, rammedinto the earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle.And now that she had put that right, and in sodoing had subdued the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention and made herremember how she was such and such a person,had such and such relations to people, she tookher hand and raised her brush. For a moment itstayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasyin the air. Where to begin?—that was the243