“It’s in another room,” Rachel explained.
“But you will play to us?” Clarissa entreated. “I can’t imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music—only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know,” she said, turning to Helen, “I don’t think music’s altogether good for people—I’m afraid not.”
“Too emotional, somehow,” said Clarissa. “One notices it at once when a boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir William Broadley told me just the same thing. Don’t you hate the kind of attitudes people go into over Wagner—like this—” She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped her hands, and assumed a look of intensity. “It really doesn’t mean that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it’s the other way round. The people who really care about an art are always the least affected. D’you know Henry Philips, the painter?” she asked.
“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not one of the greatest painters of the age. That’s what I like.”
“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at them,” said Helen.
Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.
“When you see a musician with long hair, don’t you know instinctively that he’s bad?” Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel. “Watts and Joachim—they looked just like you and me.”
“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen. “The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”
“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”
“By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,” said Helen.
“There’s something one knows a gentleman by,” said Clarissa, “but one can’t say what it is.”
“Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?”
The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste. “One of the things that can’t be said,” she would have put it. She could find no answer, but a laugh.
“Well, anyhow,” she said, turning to Rachel, “I shall insist upon your playing to me to-morrow.”
There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.
Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.
“D’you know,” she said, “I’m extraordinarily sleepy. It’s the sea air. I think I shall escape.”
A man’s voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident in discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.