Mrs. Dalloway

have about that, disliking India, and empire, and army as he did),
there were moments when civilisation, even of this sort, seemed dear to
him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England; in butlers;
chow dogs; girls in their security. Ridiculous enough, still there it
is, he thought. And the doctors and men of business and capable women
all going about their business, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him
wholly admirable, good fellows, to whom one would entrust one’s life,
companions in the art of living, who would see one through. What with
one thing and another, the show was really very tolerable; and he would
sit down in the shade and smoke.

There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s
Park--odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back
to me--the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more
in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places;
and their fathers--a woman’s always proud of her father. Bourton was a
nice place, a very nice place, but I could never get on with the old
man, he thought. There was quite a scene one night--an argument about
something or other, what, he could not remember. Politics presumably.