THE LIGHTHOUSEother in their low arm-chairs. They werecrackling in front of them the pages of The Times,when she came in from the garden, all in a muddle,about something some one had said about Christ,or hearing that a mammoth had been dug up in aLondon street, or wondering what Napoleon waslike. Then they took all this with their cleanhands (they wore grey coloured clothes; theysmelt of heather) and they brushed the scrapstogether, turning the paper, crossing their knees,and sayingsaidsomething now and then very brief.Just to please herself she would take a book fromthe shelf and stand there, watching her fatherwrite, so equally, so neatly from one side of thepage to another, with a little cough now and then[∧], /or something said briefly to the other old gentle-man opposite. And she thought, standing therewith her book open, one could let whatever onethought expand here like a leaf in water; and if itdid well here, among the old gentlemen smokingand The Times crackling then it was right. Andwatching her father as he wrote in his study, shethought (now sitting in the boat) he was not vain,nor a tyrant (these were the things they hated himmost for)[%]anddid not wish to make you pity him.Indeed, if he saw she was there, reading a book,he would ask her, as gently as any one could, Wasthere nothing he could give her?293
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