Dalloway rowed them in. He said nothing. But somehow as they watched him start, jumping on to his bicycle to ride twenty miles through the woods, wobbling off down the drive, waving his hand and disappearing, he obviously did feel, instinctively, tremendously, strongly, all that; the night; the romance; Clarissa. He deserved to have her.

For himself, he was absurd. His demands upon Clarissa (he could see it now) were absurd. He asked impossible impossible things. He made terrible scenes. She would have accepted him still, perhaps, if he had been less absurd. Sally thought so. She wrote him all that summer long letters; how they had talked of him; how she had praised him, how Clarissa burst into tears! It was an extraordinary summer—all letters, scenes, telegrams—arriving at Bourton early in the morning, hanging about till the servants were up; appalling tête-à-têtes with old Mr. Parry Parry at breakfast; Aunt Helena formidable but kind; Sally sweeping him off for talks in the vegetable garden; Clarissa in bed with headaches.

The final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had mattered more than anything in the whole of his life (it might be an exaggeration—but still so it did seem now) happened at three o’clock in the afternoon of a very hot day. It was a trifle that led up to to it—Sally at lunch saying something about Dalloway, and calling him “My name is Dalloway”; whereupon Clarissa suddenly stiffened, coloured, in a way she had, and rapped out sharply, “We’ve had enough of that feeble joke.” That was all; but for him it was precisely as if she had said, “I’m only amusing myself with you; I’ve an understanding with Richard Dalloway.” So he took it. He had not slept for nights. “It’s Reference got to be finished one way or the other,” he said to himself. He sent a note to her by Sally asking her to meet him by the fountain at three. “Something very important has happened,” he scribbled at the end of it.

The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery, far from the house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she came, even before the time, and they they stood with the fountain between them, the spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How sights fix themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss.

She did not move. “Tell me the truth, tell me the truth,” he kept on saying. He felt as if his forehead would burst. She seemed contracted, petrified. She did not move. “Tell me the truth,” he repeated, when suddenly that old man Breitkopf popped his his head in carrying the Times; stared at them; gaped; and went away. They neither of them moved. “Tell me the truth,” he repeated. He felt that he was grinding against something physically hard; she was unyielding. She was like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone. And when she said, “It’s no use. It’s no use. This is the end”— after he had spoken for hours, it seemed, with the tears running down his cheeks—it was as if she had hit him in the face. She turned, she left him, went away.

I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phan- tasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Mar- tian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day. . . .

And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.