Mrs. dalloway by virginia woolf pdf

Only the other day, visiting a patient, Sir Somebody Something in Bedford Square—

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. Clarissa could make what she would of it.

“In love!” she said. He was too much of a prig for that.

Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. It was a question of law. That was all.

The way to Regent’s Park Tube station—could they tell her the way to Regent’s Park Tube station—Maisie Johnson wanted to know. And that perhaps was the reason why, when the ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary relief, wanted nothing so much as to be alone; was annoyed to find all her little attentions—cigars, notes, a rug for the voyage—in his cabin.

And now Elizabeth was “out,” presumably; thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s friends. And what a very pretty comb, if he might say so, Mrs. Warren Smith was wearing!

When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see him. The steam coal was a little too strong for her—it made the atmosphere thick.

And then this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff and making up in public. Then she would do something quite obvious to defend herself, like this fuss with the dog—but it never took him in, he always saw through Clarissa. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now.

But she is too cold, he thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa. Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied[Pg 151] the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty years’ experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense; in fact, his sense of proportion.

But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own—is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance.

But he felt nothing.

His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended another step into the pit.

At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he assumed mechanically and with complete consciousness of its insincerity, he dropped his head on his hands.

Still the future of civilisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the[Pg 76] way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy.

For that she could dimly perceive. She had once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field—she had seen cows just after their calves were born.