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Ramsay told her not to be a fool. She sat beside him,
smiling.

Sitting opposite him, could she not see as in an X-ray
photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s 
desires to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his
flesh—that thin mist which convention had laid over his
burning desire to break into the conversation?

Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful 
phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was
that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has
been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that
and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly
again before her easel.

No quotation avails. The distinction lies here:
A spoonful of brine gives the flavor of the barrel,
but, a spoonful of the sea at sunset, what of that?

The method now is of sufficient importance to
enspell one for the space of a volume. Can such
a method be integrated, permitting both action and
“inaction” to take their places in a novel, as in life
—events too being played upon by pulsation as, in 
this book, Mrs. Woolf plays upon that which we 
have been accustomed to call monotony? Why
not? For this method, like the methods of all 
literature, is a quest. Meanwhile “To the Lighthouse” 
moves toward the core of life in letters.