To the Lighthouse: The Window, 18 Summary & Analysis

Lily observes that as soon as Mrs. Ramsay leaves, “a sort of disintegration set in.” She notes that Mrs. Ramsay is always rushing off urgently for secret reasons leaving everyone else behind.

Mrs. Ramsay goes slowly on the stairs, wanting to be still amidst “that clatter” in order to “pick out…the thing that mattered” and “clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends” in order to have it judged by her tribunal. Thus cleaned, “the event” (the dinner) seems to have always existed and merely been revealed for the first time tonight. The revelation “struck everything into stability.” She thinks how she will forever be wound into the others’ memory of the night and is flattered by the thought.

Seeing the furniture on the landing that she’s inherited from her parents, Mrs. Ramsay thinks how “[a]ll that will be revived again in the lives of Paul and Minta and is filled by a “community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin” that everything “was all one stream,” communally possessed, and individual ownership is of no consequence for “Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead.”

Entering the nursery, Mrs. Ramsay is annoyed to find James and Cam still awake, arguing about the pig skull on the wall (which had been a gift to them and which Mrs. Ramsay had asked Mildred to remove, though it remains hanging): James likes the skull and wants to keep it up while Cam is terrified of it and claims she can’t sleep with it in the room. Mrs. Ramsay lulls Cam to sleep by wrapping her shawl around the skull and cooing stories about fairies and gardens in which the skull is just a bird’s nest. Mrs. Ramsay then assures James the skull remains there unharmed under the shawl. As she’s leaving, he asks her about the Lighthouse and Mrs. Ramsay says they won’t go tomorrow but will in the near future, resenting Mr. Tansley, Mr. Ramsay, and herself for stirring in James this frustrated hope that “he would never forget.”

Mrs. Ramsay descends downstairs and finds Minta, Paul, Lily and Prue planning to go watch waves on the beach, a plan she giddily encourages, saying how much she wishes she could accompany them while feeling “withheld by something so strong that she never even thought of asking herself what it was.” When she asks if they have a watch, Paul shows her his gold one and, in doing so, intuits that she knows he’s proposed, that he needn’t tell her. Mrs. Ramsay, aloft on her giddiness, inwardly thinks how lucky Minta is to be betrothed to a man with a gold watch in a leather bag and is then “tickled by the absurdity of her thought.”