Omnibus

“And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning. … People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.” (131)

Here, we can see another instance of Elizabeth and her surroundings being written similarly to the randomness of a stream of conscious. She begins with thinking about the omnibus, the air, and the omnibus again, and then the passage zooms out, involving the surrounding people into the stream of thoughts, but instead of an internal consciousness, it’s a collection of external thoughts. Visual opinions start to pop up of what Elizabeth looks like to other people, and bringing it back in to her internal thought of it being a burden, back to the thoughts, then to how London is for her. This randomness feels similar to a stream of conscious in a way where a thought changes with what a person sees or interacts with just like how the peoples’ behaviors changed depending on what they saw or interacted with.