MRS. DALLOWAY 
heard him? She looked at the crowd. Help, help! 
she wanted to cry out to butchers’ boys and women. 
Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had stood on 
the Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Sep- 
timus reading a paper instead of talking, she had 
snatched it from him and laughed in the old man’s face 
who saw them! But failure one conceals. She must take 
him away into some park. 
“Now we will cross,” she said. 
She had a right to his arm, though it was without 
feeling. He would give her, who was so simple, so im- 
pulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in England, 
who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone. 
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of 
inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly, still 
gazed at, still ruffling the faces on both sides of the 
street with the same dark breath of veneration whether 
for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. 
The face itself had been seen only once by three people 
for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. 
But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated 
within ; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond 
Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordin- 
ary people who might now, for the first time and last, 
be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, 
of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known 
to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when 
London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying 
along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but 
bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust 
and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. 
The face in the motor car will then be known. 
It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, 
coming out of Mulberry’s with her flowers: the Queen. 
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