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The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
page 86 of 493 (17%)
without a bandanna on her head. For comfort they retreated to their
cabins, where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and
tumble. Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a
galloping horse. The world outside was merely a violent grey tumult.
For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions. Rachel had
just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a
moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she became
a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt Atlantic gale.

Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway's door, knocked,
could not be heard for the slamming of doors and the battering of wind,
and entered.

There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on a pillow,
and did not open her eyes. Then she murmured, "Oh, Dick, is that you?"

Helen shouted--for she was thrown against the washstand--"How are you?"

Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated
appearance. "Awful!" she gasped. Her lips were white inside.

Planting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne into a tumbler
with a tooth-brush in it.

"Champagne," she said.

"There's a tooth-brush in it," murmured Clarissa, and smiled; it might
have been the contortion of one weeping. She drank.

"Disgusting," she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics of humour
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