Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out

22. Chapter XXII (continued)

"Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we're nothing but patches of light--" she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the wall--"like that?"

"No," said Terence, "I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of semi-coma about five o'clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I expect--oh, no, Hirst wouldn't."

Rachel continued, "The day your note came, asking us to go on the picnic, I was sitting where you're sitting now, thinking that; I wonder if I could think that again? I wonder if the world's changed? and if so, when it'll stop changing, and which is the real world?"

"When I first saw you," he began, "I thought you were like a creature who'd lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were wet, d'you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, 'Human Beings!'"

"And I thought you--a prig," she recollected. "No; that's not quite it. There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John were like those ants--very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you--"

"You fell in love with me," he corrected her. "You were in love with me all the time, only you didn't know it."

"No, I never fell in love with you," she asserted.

"Rachel--what a lie--didn't you sit here looking at my window-- didn't you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun--?"

"No," she repeated, "I never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is, and it's the world that tells the lies and I tell the truth. Oh, what lies--what lies!"