I should like to stop all the painting and writing and
music until this kind of thing exists no longer.' Don't you feel," she
wound up, addressing Helen, "that life's a perpetual conflict?" Helen
considered for a moment. "No," she said. "I don't think I do."
There was a pause, which was decidedly uncomfortable. Mrs. Dalloway then
gave a little shiver, and asked whether she might have her fur cloak
brought to her. As she adjusted the soft brown fur about her neck a
fresh topic struck her.
"I own," she said, "that I shall never forget the _Antigone_. I saw it
at Cambridge years ago, and it's haunted me ever since. Don't you think
it's quite the most modern thing you ever saw?" she asked Ridley. "It
seemed to me I'd known twenty Clytemnestras. Old Lady Ditchling for one.
I don't know a word of Greek, but I could listen to it for ever--"
Here Mr. Pepper struck up:
{Some editions of the work contain a brief passage
from Antigone, in Greek, at this spot. ed.}
Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.
"I'd give ten years of my life to know Greek," she said, when he had
done.
"I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour," said Ridley, "and
you'd read Homer in a month. I should think it an honour to instruct
you."
Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway and the habit, now fallen into
decline, of quoting Greek in the House of Commons, noted, in the great
commonplace book that lies open beside us as we talk, the fact that all
men, even men like Ridley, really prefer women to be fashionable.
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