Mrs. Dalloway

terrace; smoked cigars. Absurd, she was--very absurd. But the charm
was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing
in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her
hands and saying aloud, “She is beneath this roof.... She is beneath
this roof!”

No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even
get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold
with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old
feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid
them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks
flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and
going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now
to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling--Othello’s
feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare
meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in
a white frock to meet Sally Seton!

She was wearing pink gauze--was that possible? She _seemed_, anyhow,
all light, glowing, like some bird or air ball that has flown in,
attached itself for a moment to a bramble. But nothing is so strange