For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. First a warning, musical then the hour, irrevocable. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.įor having lived in Westminster-how many years now? over twenty,-one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity an indescribable pause a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster) a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull it was his sayings one remembered his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was!-a few sayings like this about cabbages. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning like the flap of a wave the kiss of a wave chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”-was that it?-”I prefer men to cauliflowers”-was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace-Peter Walsh. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning-fresh as if issued to children on a beach. The doors would be taken off their hinges Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.įor Lucy had her work cut out for her.

Mrs dalloway cliff notes