“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, 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?”–‘”I prefer men to cauliflowers”–was that it…”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (p.1 ).
In the previous paragraph Clarissa Dalloway, thinks about the men taking the doors off their hinges (indirect discourse) during the present. The only segway into her past is “a little squeak of the hinges” she remembers from the summer of her 18th year at Bourton, a childhood country home where she has a failed relationship with Peter Walsh, who in this same paragraph makes his first annoying remark about her preferring men to cauliflowers. And we are introduced to a key relationship in this novel and a place we will visit many times, Bourton. The transitions from different characters thoughts and switch in time are done sometimes mid sentence.
Valeri Drach Weidmann/September 30, 2023/Mrs. Dalloway