MRS. DALLOWAY
that,” all the time talking to the dog as if it were a
human being.
But how could she swallow all that stuff about
poetry? How could she let him hold forth about
Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway
 got on his hind legs and said that no decent man
ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like
listening at keyholes (besides, the relationship was not
one that he approved). No decent man ought to let his
wife visit a deceased wife’s sister. Incredible! The only
thing to do was to pelt him with sugared almonds—it
was at dinner. But Clarissa sucked it all in; thought it
so honest of him; so independent of him; Heaven knows
if she didn’t think him the most original mind she’d
ever met!
That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself.
 There was a garden where they used to walk, a
walled-in place, with rose-bushes and giant cauliflowers
—he could remember Sally tearing off a rose, stopping
to exclaim at the beauty of the cabbage leaves in the
moonlight (it was extraordinary how vividly it all came
back to him, things he hadn’t thought of for years),
while she implored him, half laughing of course, to
carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and the
Dalloways and all the other “perfect gentlemen” who
would “stifle her soul” (she wrote reams of poetry in
those days), make a mere hostess of her, encourage her
worldliness. But one must do Clarissa justice. She
wasn’t going to marry Hugh anyhow. She had a perfectly
 clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions
were all on the surface. Beneath, she was very shrewd
—a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance,
 and with it all, purely feminine; with that
extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of making a world

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