Lakhasly

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be
taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And
then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if
issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her,
when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear
now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at
Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this
of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing
there at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke
winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and
looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the
vegetables?"—was that it?—"I prefer men to cauliflowers"—was
that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she
had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back
from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for
his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered;
his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when
millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a
few sayings like this about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to
pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing
her as one does know people who live next door to one in
Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, bluegreen,
light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown
very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing
him, waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over
twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at
night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart,
affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There!
Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour,
irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools
we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only
knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up,
building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment
afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries
sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be
dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very
reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and
trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars,omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass
bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the
strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she
loved; life; London; this moment of June.