thes, and her arch
delicate face, which showed exquisitely pink beneath hair turning grey,
she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-century masterpiece--a Reynolds
or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and slovenly
beside her. Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing with the
world as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this way and
that beneath her fingers. And her husband! Mr. Dalloway rolling that
rich deliberate voice was even more impressive. He seemed to come from
the humming oily centre of the machine where the polished rods are
sliding, and the pistons thumping; he grasped things so firmly but so
loosely; he made the others appear like old maids cheapening remnants.
Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance; a curious
scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway, mingling with the soft
rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling of her chains. As she followed,
Rachel thought with supreme self-abasement, taking in the whole course
of her life and the lives of all her friends, "She said we lived in a
world of our own. It's true. We're perfectly absurd."

"We sit in here," said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.

"You play?" said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score of
_Tristan_ which lay on the table.

"My niece does," said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel's shoulder.

"Oh, how I envy you!" Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.
"D'you remember this? Isn't it divine?" She played a bar or two with
ringed fingers upon the page.

"And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde--oh!--it's all too
thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?"

"No, I haven't," said Rachel. `"Then that's still to come. I shall never
forget my first _Parsifal_--a grilling August day, and those fat old
German women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark
theatre, and the music beginning, and one couldn't help sobbing. A kind
man went and fetched me water, I remember; and I could only cry on
his shoulder! It caught me here" (she touched her throat). "It's like
nothing else in the world! But where's your piano?" "It's in another
room," Rachel explained.

"But you will play to us?" Clarissa entreated. "I can't imagine anything
nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music--only that
sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know," she said, turning to Helen, "I
don't think music's altogether good for people--I'm afraid not."

"Too great a strain?"