Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers.
Because Lucy had enough on her plate. The doors had to be taken off their hinges; the servers of Rumpelmayer1 were coming. And what a morning, thought Clarissa Dalloway: fresh, a present for some children on the beach.
The whiff of pleasure! the dive ! That’s the impression it had always made on her when, with a little creaking of the hinges, which she could still hear, she suddenly opened the French windows, at Bourton2, and plunged into the air outside. That the air was fresh, that it was calm, more still than today, of course, in the early morning; like a crashing wave; like the kiss of a wave; lively, piquant, but at the same time (for the eighteen-year-old girl she was then) solemn, for her who had the feeling, standing in front of the wide open French window, that something terrible was on the doorstep. point of occurring; she who looked at the flowers, the trees with the smoke spiraling from them, and the crows rising and falling; standing there watching, until Peter Walsh had said, “Pensive among the vegetables?” – was that right? – or wasn’t it “I prefer humans to cauliflowers”? He must have said that one morning at breakfast when she was out on the terrace. Peter Walsch. He was going to return from India, one day or another, in June or July, she no longer knew exactly, for his letters were boring… That’s what he said they remembered; his eyes, his pocket knife, his smile, his grumpy look, and then, when thousands of things were gone forever, it’s so weird, a sentence like that about cabbages.
She stiffened a little at the curb, letting Durtnall’s delivery truck pass. A charming woman, thought Scrope Purvis (who knew her as one knows, in Westminster,3 the people who live in the house next door); she had something of a bird, a jay, blue-green, with a lightness, a vivacity, although she was over fifty years old, and had grown much whiter since her illness. She was perched there, without seeing him, very erect, waiting to cross.
Because when you live in Westminster – for how long, more than twenty years? –, even in the middle of traffic, or when you wake up at night, you feel, Clarissa was intimately convinced, a certain quality of silence, something solemn; like an indefinable suspense (but maybe it was his heart, which was said to have suffered from the Spanish flu) just before Big Ben4 rang. And There you go ! It sounds! First a warning, musical. Then the time, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved into the air. How stupid we are, she thought as she crossed Victoria Street. Only God knows the reason why we love it so much, and this way we have of seeing it, of building it around us, of shaking it up, of recreating it at every moment; and the shapeless shrews, the scum of humanity sitting on doorsteps (alcohol having caused their downfall) do the same; their fate cannot be regulated by simple decrees or regulations, precisely for this reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in their swaying, hammering, or shuffling gait; in the tumult and the din; the carriages, the automobiles, the omnibuses, the trucks, the sandwich-men who pitch their way; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the little music and the funny hum of an airplane up there, in it all was what she loved: life; London; this time of June.
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