To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

It seemed to her such nonsense—inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.

She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn’t laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it.

“Damn you,” he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example.