Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes,looking up, looking down. Looking up, there hewas—Mr Ramsay—advancing towards them, swing-ing, careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypo-crite? she repeated. Oh no—the most sincere ofmen, the truest (here he was), the best; but, lookingdown, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he istyrannical, he is unjust; and kept looking down, pur-posely, for only so could she keep steady, stayingwith the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and sawthem, what she called ‘being in love' flooded them.They became part of that unreal but penetratingand exciting universe which is the world seen throughthe eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birdssang through them. And, what was even more ex-citing, she felt, too, as she saw Mr Ramsay bearingdown and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting withJames in the window and the cloud moving and thetree bending, how life, from being made up of littleseparate incidents which one lived one by one, be-came curled and whole like a wave which bore oneup with it and threw one down with it, there, with adash on the beach.

Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she wasabout to say something criticizing Mrs Ramsay, howshe was alarming, too, in her way, high-handed,or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it