Men, and women too, letting go to the multiplicity of things

    He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained hisbeard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that thepoor man was unhappy, came to them every year as an escape; and yetevery year she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said, "I amgoing to the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?" and she felthim wince. He did not trust her. It was his wife's doing. She rememberedthat iniquity of his wife's towards him, which had made her turn to steeland adamant there, in the horrible little room in St John's Wood, whenwith her own eyes she had seen that odious woman turn him out of thehouse. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat; he had the tiresomenessof an old man with nothing in the world to do; and she turnedhim out of the room. She said, in her odious way, "Now, Mrs Ramsayand I want to have a little talk together," and Mrs Ramsay could see, as ifbefore her eyes, the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he moneyenough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? half a crown?
　　eighteenpence? Oh, she could not bear to think of the little indignitiesshe made him suffer. And always now (why, she could not guess, exceptthat it came probably from that woman somehow) he shrank from her.
　　He never told her anything. But what more could she have done? Therewas a sunny room given up to him. The children were good to him.
　　Never did she show a sign of not wanting him. She went out of her wayindeed to be friendly. Do you want stamps, do you want tobacco? Here'sa book you might like and so on. And after all—after all (here insensiblyshe drew herself together, physically, the sense of her own beauty becoming,as it did so seldom, present to her) after all, she had not generallyany difficulty in making people like her; for instance, George Manning;Mr Wallace; famous as they were, they would come to her of anevening, quietly, and talk alone over her fire. She bore about with her,she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erectinto any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, andshrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved. She hadentered rooms where mourners sat. Tears had flown in her presence.
　　Men, and women too, letting go to the multiplicity of things, had allowedthemselves with her the relief of simplicity. It injured her that heshould shrink. It hurt her. And yet not cleanly, not rightly. That waswhat she minded, coming as it did on top of her discontent with her husband;the sense she had now when Mr Carmichael shuffled past, justnodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers,that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to give, tohelp, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished soinstinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, "O Mrs Ram-say! dear Mrs Ramsay… Mrs Ramsay, of course!" and need her and sendfor her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, andtherefore when Mr Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did at thismoment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly, shedid not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of thepettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed theyare, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best. Shabby and wornout, and not presumably (her cheeks were hollow, her hair was white)any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy, she had better devote hermind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify thatbundle of sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he was),her son James.
　　"The man's heart grew heavy," she read aloud, "and he would not go.