Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

30. CHAPTER XXX (continued)

Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same time.

"No, you're right," he said. "I don't know you. I've never known you."

"Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else," she mused.

Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed the frontispiece.

"I say I do know you, Katharine," he affirmed, shutting the book. "It's only for moments that I go mad."

"Do you call two whole nights a moment?"

"I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you are. No one has ever known you as I know you. . . . Could you have taken down that book just now if I hadn't known you?"

"That's true," she replied, "but you can't think how I'm divided--how I'm at my ease with you, and how I'm bewildered. The unreality--the dark--the waiting outside in the wind--yes, when you look at me, not seeing me, and I don't see you either. . . . But I do see," she went on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, "heaps of things, only not you."

"Tell me what you see," he urged.