There is an expressi~n, one of those unused phrases that nest in the tall tree-top of the idiom book, 'I would rather have his room than his company.' One learned its French equivalent, which was not less excluded from common speech (strange and beautiful it is, like one of Swinburne's nature poems, this mating of unuttered phrases with their alien fellow-outcast over frontier seas and mountains, through the kind ponderous idiom-book), and it was forgotten, till it should be recalled by Mrs Woolf's last book. Very strongly has Mrs Woolf preferred Jacob's room to his company. Jacob lives, but that is hearsay. Jacob dies; there could be nothing more negative than the death of one who never (that we could learn for certain) lived, reported by a mouth that makes every human event she speaks of seem as if it had not happened. But his room we know. 'The eighteenth century has its distinction. These houses were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorways a rose or a ram's skull is carved in wood. Even the panels, painted in raspberrycoloured paint, have their distinction.' We know so much about it; how his mother's letter, in its pale blue envelope, lay waiting for him by the biscuit-box; how the Globe looked pinkish under the lamplight and was stared at, but not read, one cold night; how the room heard, at hours when the elderly lie abed, young men disputing on whether this or that line came in Virgil or Lucretius; and how, Jacob dead in the war, it felt his absence. 'Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there ... '