Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book) the best perhaps but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. Looking along the level of Mr Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. She did not know how she would have put it but it would have been something critical. She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. And it would never be seen never be hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course the colour could have been thinned and faded the shapes etherealised that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded.”
And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. “Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves.
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