Mrs. Dalloway

Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t
so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to
blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the
sake of goodness.

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy
(though goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere
sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make
of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that
sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed
practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it
was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd
little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. (Very likely, she
would have talked to those lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.)
She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed
people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that
she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant
parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn’t mean,
blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There she