TO THE LIGHTHOUSEcould depend so much as he did upon people’spraise."Oh, but," said Lily, “think of his work!"Whenever she "thought of his work" she alwayssaw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It wasAndrew’s doing. She asked him what his father’sbooks were about. "Subject and object and the na-ture of reality," Andrew had said. And when shesaid Heavens, she had no notion what that meant."Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "whenyou’re not there."So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr.Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodgednow in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reachedthe orchard. And with a painful effort of concen-tration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shapedleaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one ofthose scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted,whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by yearsof muscular integrity, which stuck there, its fourlegs in air. Naturally, if one’s days were passed inthis seeing of angular essences, this reducing oflovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds andblue and silver to a white deal four-legged table(and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do),naturally one could not be judged like an ordinaryperson.38
