MRS. DALLOWAY 
ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had 
her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the 
pavement, could have looked even differently! 
She would have been, in the first place, dark like 
Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and 
beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bex- 
borough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in 
politics like a man; with a country house; very digni- 
fied, very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow 
pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a 
bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had 
nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that 
she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she 
stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all 
its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had 
the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; un- 
known; there being no more marrying, no more having 
of children now, but only this astonishing and rather 
solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, 
this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; 
this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. 
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the 
morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no 
splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where 
her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few 
pearls; salmon on an iceblock. 
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. 
“That is all,” she repeated, pausing for a moment at the 
window of a glove shop where, before the War, you 
could buy almost perfect gloves. And her old Uncle 
William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and 
her gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in 
the middle of the War. He had said, “I have had 
enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for 
Wot 
WA 13