And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful
silent people passed through it, to whom you could go and say anything
you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her
arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the dance, but the
entire past, tenderly and humorously, as if she had been turning in a
fog for a long time, and could now see exactly where she had turned. For
the methods by which she had reached her present position, seemed to her
very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not
known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that
one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed
blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and
knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something
had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm,
this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called
living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew as she knew now where they
were going; and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for
her, but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning.
When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind was
apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of the
Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life of her father.
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