Mrs. Woolf’s passages are much more subtle, though most of them, like Anderson’s, are incorporated in Clarissa Dalloway’s reminiscences of her girlhood. Even preliminary to these, however, we learn that Mrs. Dalloway is happy that her husband insists on her sleeping in a separate room after an illness. She could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet; ... through some contraction of this cold spirit she had failed him again and again. She could see what she lacked.... It was something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For _that_ she could dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl ... like a faint scent or a violin next door. She did undoubtedly feel then what men felt. It was a sudden revelation which one tried to check and then yielded to, and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation.[49] Her first experience of this sort came to her in her late teens or early twenties in connection with the delightful madcap Sally Seton. Had that not after all been love?... At some party she had a distinct recollection of saying to the man she was with, “Who is _that_?” And all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally.... The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was protective on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they always spoke of marriage as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry.... She could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy ... and dressing and going downstairs, feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling—all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton! [Sally] stood by the fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress ... when suddenly she said, “What a shame to sit indoors!” and they all went out on to the terrace and walked up and down. She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down![50] When the men of the party (one of them in love with her) return and make casual, half-teasing conversation,