They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that mostpeople were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms,and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhereto be seen. They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall,which was almost empty, and full of the light swishing sounds ofair going to and fro in a large empty space. Yes, this arm-chairwas the same arm-chair in which Rachel had sat that afternoon whenEvelyn came up, and this was the magazine she had been looking at,and this the very picture, a picture of New York by lamplight.

　　How odd it seemed--nothing had changed.

　　By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairsand to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figurespossessed a sort of grace and beauty, although they were allunknown people. Sometimes they went straight through and out intothe garden by the swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutesand bent over the tables and began turning over the newspapers.

　　Terence and Rachel sat watching them through their half-closed eyelids--the Johnsons, the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons', the Lees,the Morleys, the Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressedin white flannels and were carrying racquets under their arms,some were short, some tall, some were only children, and some perhapswere servants, but they all had their standing, their reason forfollowing each other through the hall, their money, their position,whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up looking at them,for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half asleepin his chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer;she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements,and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other,and loiter and pass on and disappear. But after a time her thoughtswandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been heldin this room, only then the room itself looked quite different.

　　Glancing round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room.

　　It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that nightwhen they came into it out of the darkness; it had been filled,too, with little red, excited faces, always moving, and people sobrightly dressed and so animated that they did not seem in the leastlike real people, nor did you feel that you could talk to them.

　　And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful silent peoplepassed through it, to whom you could go and say anything you liked.

　　She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her arm-chair, andable to review not only the night of the dance, but the entire past,tenderly and humorously, as if she had been turning in a fogfor a long time, and could now see exactly where she had turned.

　　For the methods by which she had reached her present position,seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about themwas that she had not known where they were leading her. That wasthe strange thing, that one did not know where one was going,or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret,always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing ledto another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing,and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty,and it was this process that people called living. Perhaps, then,every one really knew as she knew now where they were going;and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for her,but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning.

　　When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kindwas apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visitof the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life ofher father.

　　The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed herin her calm. She was not sleepy although she did not see anythingvery distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hallbecame vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactlywhere they were going, and the sense of their certainty filled herwith comfort. For the moment she was as detached and disinterestedas if she had no longer any lot in life, and she thought that shecould now accept anything that came to her without being perplexedby the form in which it appeared. What was there to frighten orto perplex in the prospect of life? Why should this insight everagain desert her? The world was in truth so large, so hospitable,and after all it was so simple. "Love," St. John had said, "that seemsto explain it all." Yes, but it was not the love of man for woman,of Terence for Rachel. Although they sat so close together, they hadceased to be little separate bodies; they had ceased to struggleand desire one another. There seemed to be peace between them.

　　It might be love, but it was not the love of man for woman.

　　Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying backin his chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was,and his chin so small, and his nose curved like a switchbackwith a knob at the end. Naturally, looking like that he was lazy,and ambitious, and full of moods and faults. She rememberedtheir quarrels, and in particular how they had been quarreling aboutHelen that very afternoon, and she thought how often they wouldquarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty years in which they wouldbe living in the same house together, catching trains together,and getting annoyed because they were so different. But all thiswas superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that wenton beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that lifewas independent of her, and independent of everything else.

　　So too, although she was going to marry him and to live with himfor thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to beso close to him, she was independent of him; she was independentof everything else. Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love thatmade her understand this, for she had never felt this independence,this calm, and this certainty until she fell in love with him,and perhaps this too was love. She wanted nothing else.

　　For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little distancelooking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their arm-chairs.

　　She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or not,and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the hall.

　　The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes.

　　He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.

　　"Well," she was saying, "this is very nice. It is very nice indeed.

　　Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot oftenhappen that two couples who have never seen each other before meetin the same hotel and decide to get married." Then she pausedand smiled, and seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terencerose and asked her whether it was true that she had finished her book.

　　Some one had said that she had really finished it. Her face lit up;she turned to him with a livelier expression than usual.

　　"Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it," she said.

　　"That is, omitting Swinburne--Beowulf to Browning--I ratherlike the two B's myself. Beowulf to Browning," she repeated,"I think that is the kind of title which might catch one's eye ona railway book-stall."She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no oneknew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it.

　　Also she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, consideringwhat anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it,she could not resist telling them a little more about it.

　　"I must confess," she continued, "that if I had known how manyclassics there are in English literature, and how verbose the bestof them contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work.

　　They only allow one seventy thousand words, you see.""Only seventy thousand words!" Terence exclaimed.

　　"Yes, and one has to say something about everybody," Miss Allan added.

　　"That is what I find so difficult, saying something differentabout everybody." Then she thought that she had said enoughabout herself, and she asked whether they had come down to jointhe tennis tournament. "The young people are very keen about it.

　　It begins again in half an hour."Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentarypause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had rememberedsomething that would serve to keep her distinct from other people.

　　"You're the remarkable person who doesn't like ginger." But thekindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made themfeel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals,she had laid upon them the burden of the new generation.

　　"And in that I quite agree with her," said a voice behind;Mrs. Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger.

　　"It's associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing,she suffered dreadfully, so it isn't fair to call her horrid)who used to give it to us when we were small, and we never hadthe courage to tell her we didn't like it. We just had to putit out in the shrubbery--she had a big house near Bath."They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stoppedby the impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in runningdownstairs to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.

　　"Well," she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachelby the arm, "I call this splendid! I guessed it was going to happenfrom the very beginning! I saw you two were made for each other.

　　Now you've just got to tell me all about it--when's it to be,where are you going to live--are you both tremendously happy?"But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot,who was passing them with her eager but uncertain movement,carrying in her hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle.

　　She would have passed them, but Mrs. Thornbury went up and stopped her.

　　"Thank you, Hughling's better," she replied, in answer to Mrs. Thornbury'senquiry, "but he's not an easy patient. He wants to know what histemperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and if I don'ttell him he suspects. You know what men are when they're ill!

　　And of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though heseems very willing and anxious to help" (here she lowered her voicemysteriously), "one can't feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the sameas a proper doctor. If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet,"she added, "I know it would cheer him up--lying there in bed all day--and the flies--But I must go and find Angelo--the food here--of course, with an invalid, one wants things particularly nice."And she hurried past them in search of the head waiter. The worryof nursing her husband had fixed a plaintive frown upon her forehead;she was pale and looked unhappy and more than usually inefficient,and her eyes wandered more vaguely than ever from point to point.

　　"Poor thing!" Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed. She told them that for somedays Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor availablewas the brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said,whose right to the title of doctor was not above suspicion.

　　"I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel," Mrs. Thornburyremarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden.

　　"I spent six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice,"she continued. "But even so, I look back upon them as some of thehappiest weeks in my life. Ah, yes," she said, taking Rachel's arm,"you think yourself happy now, but it's nothing to the happinessthat comes afterwards. And I assure you I could find it in my heartto envy you young people! You've a much better time than we had,I may tell you. When I look back upon it, I can hardly believehow things have changed. When we were engaged I wasn't allowed to gofor walks with William alone--some one had always to be in the roomwith us--I really believe I had to show my parents all his letters!--though they were very fond of him too. Indeed, I may say theylooked upon him as their own son. It amuses me," she continued,"to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they spoiltheir grand-children!"The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her placebefore the teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she hadcollected quite a number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper,who were strolling about, waiting for the tournament to begin.

　　A murmuring tree, a river brimming in the moonlight, Terence's wordscame back to Rachel as she sat drinking the tea and listeningto the words which flowed on so lightly, so kindly, and with suchsilvery smoothness. This long life and all these children hadleft her very smooth; they seemed to have rubbed away the marksof individuality, and to have left only what was old and maternal.

　　"And the things you young people are going to see!"Mrs. Thornbury continued. She included them all in her forecast,she included them all in her maternity, although the partycomprised William Pepper and Miss Allan, both of whom mighthave been supposed to have seen a fair shar............