TO THE LIGHTHOUSEwould not altogether do. It was the worst of takingwomen on walks. Once on the beach they separated,he going out on to the Pope’s Nose, taking his shoesoff, and rolling his socks in them and letting thatcouple look after themselves; Nancy waded out to herown rocks and searched her own pools and let thatcouple look after themselves. She crouched low downand touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones,who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of therock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea,and made the minnows into sharks and whales, andcast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding herhand against the sun, and so brought darkness anddesolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorantand innocent creatures, and then took her hand awaysuddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on thepale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gaunt-leted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was stillenlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissuresof the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slideimperceptibly above the pool and rest on that waver-ing line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which thesmoke of steamers made waver upon the horizon, shebecame, with all that power sweeping savagely in andinevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two sen-ses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had di-minished again) flowering within it made her feel thatshe was bound hand and foot and unable to move bythe intensity of feelings which reduced her own body,her own life, and the lives of all the people in theworld, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to thewaves, crouched over the pool, she brooded.

And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in,90
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