To the Lighthouse: The Window, 19 Summary & Analysis

Entering the sitting room in which Mr. Ramsay sits reading, Mrs. Ramsay feels “she had to come here to get something she wanted.” What she wants has to do with sitting in her chair by her lamp but entails something more, too, which she cannot put her finger on.

Mrs. Ramsay observes that Mr. Ramsay is absorbed reading a book by Sir Walter Scott, which she knows he has chosen because Mr. Tansley said at dinner that no one read Scott any more. She worries briefly about Mr. Ramsay’s anxiety about himself, but pushes the worries aside as meaningless. She has faith in him.

Mrs. Ramsay sits knitting and feels herself “sinking deeper” towards something she wanted, still not knowing what it is. Words from the poem Mr. Ramsay had recited at dinner “begin washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically” setting off small lights in her mind that seem to “[leave] their perches…to fly across and across.” She murmurs the words of the poem as she reaches for a book to read: “And all the lives we ever lived / And all the lives to be, / Are full of trees and changing leaves.”

Mrs. Ramsay begins reading feeling she is “swinging herself” from line to line. Mr. Ramsay reads Scott with obvious relish, “fortified” and freed of all the nagging worries that had built up during dinner. Now he feels “it didn’t matter a damn who reached Z,” for someone would even if he didn’t. Finishing his chapter, he looks up to watch Mrs. Ramsay reading peacefully. She is absorbed in “climbing up those branches” of the lines, grasping flowers, ascending to “the summit” where she found “beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded there—the sonnet.”

Mrs. Ramsay puts down her book and searches for things to say to Mr. Ramsay. They are both still dreamy, half-preoccupied by what they’ve been reading. She tells him Paul and Minta are engaged and he says he’d guessed it. She jokes, recounting her silly thought about Paul’s gold watch and leather bag. Mentioning the engagement draws Mrs. Ramsay’s mind to wonder “what was the value, the meaning” of marriage. She aches for Mr. Ramsay to say something, and feels the first tug towards despair. When he says she won’t finish knitting her stocking tonight, Mrs. Ramsay is grateful for “the asperity in his voice reproving her” and agrees with him. She thinks “the marriage will turn out all right.”

Mrs. Ramsay feels from Mr. Ramsay’s look that he wants her to tell him she loves him. Yet “she never could,” since talking does not come as easily to her, she thinks, as it does to him. In the past he’s called her “heartless” for never articulating her love aloud. Mrs. Ramsay gets up to look at the Lighthouse through the window and feels the admiration for her beauty in Mr. Ramsay’s gaze and feels him still wishing she would pronounce her love. She turns to look at him and smiles and knows he knows how much she loves him. She is full of joy. She says that he’s “right, it’s going to be wet tomorrow.” She smiles knowing he feels her love, “for she had triumphed again.”