To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

She was silent always. She knew then—she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said.