THE WINDOW

which lapses suddenly from its high station, flauntand sink on laughter easily, resting her whole weightupon what at the other end of the table her husbandwas saying about the square root of one thousandtwo hundred and fifty-three. That was the number,it seemed, on his watch.

What did it all mean? To this day she had nonotion. A square root? What was that? Her sonsknew. She leant on them; on cubes and squareroots; that was what they were talking about now;on Voltaire and Madame de Staël; on the characterof Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure;on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey’s Memoirs: she letit uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabricof the masculine intelligence, which ran up anddown, crossed this way and that, like iron girdersspanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world,so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shuther eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a childstaring up from its pillow winks at the myriadlayers of the leaves of a tree. Then she woke up. Itwas still being fabricated. William Bankes was prais-

ing the Waverley novels.

He read one of them every six months, he said.And why should that make Charles Tansley angry?He rushed in (all, thought Mrs. Ramsay, becausePrue will not be nice to him) and denounced the159
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