No biography or history has a word to say about it. For all the dinners are cooked the plates and cups washed the children sent to school and gone out into the world. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. The elder is close on eighty but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months.

But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. “However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon.

The voyage out by virginia woolf