“Well, anyhow,” she said, turning to Rachel, “I shall insist upon your playing to me to-morrow.”

There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.

Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.

“D’you know,” she said, “I’m extraordinarily sleepy.  It’s the sea air.  I think I shall escape.”

A man’s voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident in discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.

“Good-night—­good-night!” she said.  “Oh, I know my way—­do pray for calm!  Good-night!”

Her yawn must have been the image of a yawn.  Instead of letting her mouth droop, dropping all her clothes in a bunch as though they depended on one string, and stretching her limbs to the utmost end of her berth, she merely changed her dress for a dressing-gown, with innumerable frills, and wrapping her feet in a rug, sat down with a writing-pad on her knee.  Already this cramped little cabin was the dressing room of a lady of quality.  There were bottles containing liquids; there were trays, boxes, brushes, pins.  Evidently not an inch of her person lacked its proper instrument.  The scent which had intoxicated Rachel pervaded the air.  Thus established, Mrs. Dalloway began to write.  A pen in her hands became a thing one caressed paper with, and she might have been stroking and tickling a kitten as she wrote: 

Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine.  It’s not the ship, so much as the people.  One does come across queer sorts as one travels.  I must say I find it hugely amusing.  There’s the manager of the line—­called Vinrace—­a nice big Englishman, doesn’t say much—­you know the sort.  As for the rest—­they might have come trailing out of an old number of Punch.  They’re like people playing croquet in the ’sixties.  How long they’ve all been shut up in this ship I don’t know—­years and years I should say—­but one feels as though one had boarded a little separate world, and they’d never been on shore, or done ordinary things in their lives.  It’s what I’ve always said about literary people—­they’re far the hardest of any to get on with.  The worst of it is, these people—­a man and his wife and a niece—­might have been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of.  The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s.  They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in the evening.  However, I can’t help that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—­wouldn’t you?  It matters ever so much more than the soup. (It’s odd how things like that do matter so much more than what’s generally supposed to matter.  I’d rather have my head cut off than wear flannel next