The implication in the novel "To the Lighthouse" is that right before the novel starts the child asks, "Can we go to the lighthouse?"

The novel starts thusly: "'Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,' said Mrs. Ramsay. 'But you'll have to be up with the lark,' she added."

The short form would be to say that this answer made the boy who asked happy.

The Virginia Woolf form is more thorough, more like what goes on inside:

"Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people, even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of Army and Navy Stores, endowed wthe picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy."