matrons, who made her feel outside their world and motherless, and
turning back, she left them abruptly. She slammed the door of her room,
and pulled out her music. It was all old music--Bach and Beethoven,
Mozart and Purcell--the pages yellow, the engraving rough to the finger.
In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue
in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of
complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she stumbled; now she
faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but an invisible
line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose a shape,
a building. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really
difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together, and drew
upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock at the
door. It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs. Dalloway stood in the room
leaving the door open, so that a strip of the white deck and of the blue
sea appeared through the opening. The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to
the ground.

"Don't let me interrupt," Clarissa implored. "I heard you playing, and I
couldn't resist. I adore Bach!"

Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She stood up
awkwardly.

"It's too difficult," she said.

"But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have stayed outside."

"No," said Rachel.

She slid _Cowper's_ _Letters_ and _Wuthering_ _Heights_ out of the