Mrs. Dalloway

well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well,
considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore
(she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its
capacities, seemed nothing--nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of
being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying,
no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather
solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs.
Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the
season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll
of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty
years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,”
she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop where,
before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her old Uncle
William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. He had
turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the War. He had said, “I
have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but