Morning: The Flowers (10 a.m. to about 11.30)

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.

She was fifty-two, lately recovered from an illness that had turned her hair white; she lived in Westminster, with her husband Richard, a Conservative Member of Parliament, and their daughter Elizabeth, who was seventeen. She stood on the kerb waiting for a van to pass. There she perched, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. And she loved it all: London, this moment of June.

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 before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. 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.

The war was over, thank Heaven — over. But she thought of Mrs Foxcroft eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; and of Lady Bexborough, who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed.

In the Park she met Hugh Whitbread, an old friend, splendidly dressed, who had something at Court, and whose wife was always ill; and she felt, as she always did with Hugh, a little like a schoolgirl. She walked up Bond Street. She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Did it matter, then, she asked herself, that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her? Somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived — part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best.

In Hatchard's shop window an open book showed the lines from Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages.

In Mulberry's the florist, among the delphiniums, the sweet peas, the bunches of lilac, Miss Pym was helping her — when there was a violent explosion in the street outside, like a pistol shot. A motor car had backfired. Its blinds were drawn; inside, people whispered, was someone very great — the Prince of Wales, the Queen, the Prime Minister. Crowds stopped and stared.

Among them, on the pavement, stood a young man of about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too: Septimus Warren Smith. Beside him his wife, Lucrezia — Rezia — a young Italian girl, a hat-maker, whom he had married in Milan at the end of the war. Septimus thought the motor car had stopped because of him; that the world was waving, quivering, threatening to burst into flames; that it was he who was blocking the way. "I will kill myself," he had said to her that morning; and Rezia, terrified, could tell no one. Dr Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him.

Then an aeroplane overhead began writing letters in smoke in the sky — advertising toffee — and everyone looked up and tried to read the words; and Septimus, looking up, thought it was signalling to him; and he wept, for it was so beautiful; and the trees waved their leaves, and the sparrows sang. He had been a clerk, and a lover of Shakespeare and Keats, and he had volunteered in 1914, one of the first, to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. In the trenches he had made a friend, Evans, his officer; and Evans had been killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy; and Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. Now he could not feel at all. That was his crime.

He had come up to London from Stroud as a boy, leaving a note for his mother, to be a poet; he had taken a room near the Euston Road and worked as a clerk for Mr Brewer, an auctioneer and estate agent, who thought well of him and saw a future for him; and in the evenings he had gone to lectures on Shakespeare given by Miss Isabel Pole, and had written poems for her and fallen in love with her. He went to the war; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection, of his officer, Evans by name. And after Evans was killed, and the war was over, he had been billeted in Milan, in the house of an innkeeper whose daughters made hats; and one evening, in a panic that he could not feel, he became engaged to the youngest, Lucrezia. They came to London. He went back to his office. He read Shakespeare again, and found in it now only loathing, the loathing of the human race; and Dante, and Aeschylus, the same. The world had no meaning. He could not feel.

Dr Holmes, a large, cheerful general practitioner, came to see him and told him there was nothing whatever the matter with him; that he should take up a hobby, eat porridge for breakfast, go to the music hall, and stop thinking about himself; that health was largely a matter in our own control. "Throw yourself into outside interests," said Holmes. And Septimus felt himself the most exalted of mankind, and also the criminal whom society condemns.

Clarissa came home. The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Lady Bruton, the maid told her, had asked Mr Dalloway to lunch — without her. It was nothing; but it shrivelled her, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar. She went upstairs to her room, a narrow attic room where she slept alone, since her illness, in a narrow bed; like a nun withdrawing. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.

And she thought of Sally Seton, in the old days at Bourton, when they were girls: Sally, wild, dark, beautiful, who smoked cigars and ran naked down the passage to fetch her sponge bag; Sally, whom she had loved. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it — a diamond, something infinitely precious. "If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy." That was her feeling — Othello's feeling.

She took out her green dress, the silver-green dress for the party, which had a tear in it, and sat down to mend it. Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; and the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.

Then the doorbell rang, and someone ran upstairs, and the door opened, and there was Peter Walsh — back from India — at her door, at eleven o'clock in the morning, unannounced.

He was older; he had grown thinner; he still played with his pocket-knife. He had come back to arrange a divorce for a woman in India with whom he was in love — Daisy, the wife of a Major. Clarissa thought: how like Peter! He looked at her mending her dress, as he had looked at her thirty years before, and thought her hard, cold, the perfect hostess. She thought him a failure. And yet. They had loved each other. She had refused him, at Bourton, by a fountain, all those years ago, and married Richard; and if she had married Peter, this gaiety would have been hers all day; and he would have made her miserable. And he — suddenly, absurdly, he burst into tears; and she held his hand and kissed him, and felt his love and his misery; and thought, If I had married him —

They talked, after the first shock, of the old days: of Bourton, of her father, of Sally Seton, of the lake. "Do you remember the lake?" she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart. Peter told her he was in love — with a girl in India; and he took out his knife and opened it, and played with it, and she was irritated, as she had always been, by that habit. "And what are you going to do?" she asked him. Oh the lawyers and solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln's Inn, they were going to do it, he said. And he thought how she had grown older, and that she would think him a failure — as he was; he had been sent down from Oxford, he had gone to India and made nothing much of himself, and here he was at fifty-three with nothing to show. And then the tears came.

The door opened. "Here is my Elizabeth," said Clarissa. Peter got up hastily. And as he left the house, running downstairs, she called after him from the landing: "Remember my party to-night! Remember my party!"