Mrs. Dalloway

being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound,
Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her
martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald
man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at
Manchester. And she had five boys!

She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it seemed
so familiar--that they should be talking. They would discuss the past.
With the two of them (more even than with Richard) she shared her past;
the garden; the trees; old Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any
voice; the drawing-room wall-paper; the smell of the mats. A part of
this Sally must always be; Peter must always be. But she must leave
them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must go up to
Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the
edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical
successful man’s wife), she must go up to Lady Bradshaw and say....

But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.

“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly dared to come
in,” she said.

And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair and