MRS. DALLOWAY 
And then, opening her eyes, how fresh, like frilled linen 
clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays, the roses 
looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding 
their heads up ; and all the sweet peas spreading in 
their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it 
were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to 
pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer's 
day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its 
carnations, its arum lilies, was over; and it was the 
moment between six and seven when every flower— 
roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, 
deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, 
purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey 
white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, 
over the evening primroses! 
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to 
jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, 
more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this 
colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a 
wave which she let flow over her and surmount that 
hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her 
up and up when—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside! 
“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to 
the window to look, and coming back and smiling 
apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as if 
those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all Aer 
fault. 
The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway 
jump and Miss Pym go to the window and apologise 
came from a motor car which had drawn to the side of 
the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s shop win- 
dow. Passers-by, who, of course, stopped and stared, 
had just time to see a face of the very greatest im- 
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