Mrs Dalloway's Party by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

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Ancestors

MRS VALLANCE, AS she replied to Jack Renshaw who had made that rather silly remark of his about not liking to watch cricket matches, wished that she could make him understand somehow what became every moment more obvious at a party like this, that if her father had been alive people would have realised how foolish, how wicked – no, not so much wicked as silly and ugly – how, compared to really dignified simple men and women like her father, like her dear mother, all this seemed to her so trivial. How very different his mind was, and his life; and her mother, and how differently, entirely differently she herself had been brought up.

‘Here we all are,’ she said suddenly, ‘cooped up here in one room the size of an oven, when up in Scotland where I was born we should all be – ’: she owed it to these foolish young men who were after all quite nice, though a little under-sized, to make them understand what her father, what her mother and she herself too, for she was like them at heart, felt. And then it came over her in a rush, how she owed it to the world to make men understand how her father and her mother, how she too, were quite different.

He had stopped in Edinburgh for a night once, Mr Renshaw said.

‘Was she Scotch?’ he asked.

He did not know then who her father was, that she was John Ellis Rattray’s daughter and her mother was Catherine Macdonald; and one night in Edinburgh! And she had spent all those wonderful years there, there and at Elliotshaw on the Northumbrian border. There she had run wild among the currant bushes; there her father’s friends had come and only a girl as she was, she had heard the most wonderful talk of her time. She could see them still; her father, Sir Duncan Clements, Mr Rogers (old Mr Rogers was her ideal of a Greek sage) sitting under the cedar tree; after dinner in the starlight.

They talked about everything in the world, it seemed to her now; they were too large-minded ever to laugh at other people; they had taught her, though she was only a girl, how to revere beauty. What was there beautiful in this stuffy London room?

‘Oh, those poor flowers,’ she exclaimed. For a carnation or two were actually trodden under foot, for petals of flowers were all crumpled and crushed. For she felt almost too much for flowers. Her mother had loved flowers; ever since she was a child she had been brought up to feel that to hurt a flower was to hurt the most exquisite thing in nature. Nature had always been a passion with her; the mountains, the sea. And here in London, one looked out of the window and saw more houses. One had a dreadful sense of human beings packed on top of each other in little boxes. It was an atmosphere in which she could not

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