THE LIGHTHOUSEa muddle, about something some one had saidabout Christ; a mammoth had been dug up ina London street; what was the great Napoleonlike? 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 said something now and then very brief.In a kind of trance 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, here one could let whateverone thought expand 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 mostlovable, he was most wise; he was not vain nora tyrant. Indeed, if he saw she was there,reading a book, he would ask her, as gentlyas any one could, Was there nothing he couldgive her?
Lest this should be wrong, she looked at himreading the little book with the shiny covermottled like a plover’s egg. No; it was right.291
