Mrs. Dalloway

intimacy.

She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping the woman,
the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with three strokes of a
knife. What a waste! What a folly! All his life long Peter had been
fooled like that; first getting sent down from Oxford; next marrying
the girl on the boat going out to India; now the wife of a Major in the
Indian Army--thank Heaven she had refused to marry him! Still, he was
in love; her old friend, her dear Peter, he was in love.

“But what are you going to do?” she asked him. Oh the lawyers and
solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn, they were
going to do it, he said. And he actually pared his nails with his
pocket-knife.

For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in
irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his
weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was
feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age,
how silly!

I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m up against, he thought,
running his finger along the blade of his knife, Clarissa and Dalloway
and all the rest of them; but I’ll show Clarissa--and then to his utter