Mrs. Dalloway: Chapter 4 - Summary

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Mrs. Dalloway Recalls her Memories Associated with Sally Seton.

      After buying the flowers Mrs. Dalloway comes back to home. She feels very much exalted, blessed, purified like a nun withdrawing from the world. She feels grateful to Richard who has provided him every good thing of life. But this feeling cannot sustain itself and soon turns into utter disappointment when she is informed by the Lucy that Mr. Richard would take lunch out that afternoon with Lady Bruton. She suffers from deep anguish and distress at this news. She begins to shiver like a plant on the river-bed. She starts thinking about Lady Bruton, an old lady with wrinkles on her face. She fears time which robs the beauty and physical charm. In this state she goes upstairs to her bedroom. She feels herself all alone and neglected like an attic room. She begins to introspect and question herself. Certainly there is something cold and virginal about her which causes her lack of response to Richard’s love-making on several occasions. She is beautiful and intellectual. But she lacks warmth of love. Its very rare that she regains the womanly warmth, she often finds herself indulged into her spiritual isolation. These thoughts make her reminded of girlhood friend Sally Seton. Sally Seton was a kind of strange girl. There was very intimate friendship between them. Clarissa Dalloway still remembers those monuments how she sat on the floors with her arms around her knees and smoked cigarettes. Sally was exceptionally beautiful with dark large eyes. She had a sort of abandonment which she lacked herself. Sally was so beautiful that when Clarrisa first saw her, she forgot to wink. During the summer she had stayed with her at Bourton. Sally was intelligent and had great knowledge of the world. Thus, they were close friends. They talked to each other for hours together on the ways and means of improving the world.

      Sally Seton had a magnetic personality. She had her own fascinating style of handling flowers. Once she had run naked along the passage to get sponge and other members of his family got shock yet Clarissa Dalloway liked this woman. She feels a sense of possessiveness for her. Mrs. Dalloway could not cease herself from liking her when she smoked and moved round the parapet through bicycle.

      Mrs. Dalloway again starts thinking about Peter Walsh. She always thinks about that quarrel which separated them. She always had given importance to his opinion because he was a clever man. She thinks that if Peter were there before her, he would surely call her old and say that she has become white. She finds her “face pointed; dart-like; definite”, while looking into the mirror.

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