Mrs. Dalloway

them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never
spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter--even
trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her
horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for
all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which
appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of
us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow
attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after
death ... perhaps--perhaps.

Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her
theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their
actual meetings had been what with his absences and interruptions
(this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth, like a long-legged
colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to talk to Clarissa)
the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery
about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain--the
actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in
the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent,