"And they were nice," said Rachel. "They were extraordinarily interesting." She tried to recall the image of the world as a live thing that Richard had given her, with drains like nerves, and bad houses like patches of diseased skin. She recalled his watchwords—Unity—Imagination, and saw again the bubbles meeting in her tea-cup as he spoke of sisters and canaries, boyhood and his father, her small world becoming wonderfully enlarged.
"But all people don't seem to you equally interesting, do they?" asked Mrs. Ambrose.
Rachel explained that most people had hitherto been symbols; but that when they talked to one they ceased to be symbols, and became "I could listen to them for ever!" she exclaimed, and became absorbed in her thoughts.
Helen meanwhile stitched at her embroidery and thought over the things they had said. Her conclusion was that she would very much like to show her niece, if it were possible, how to live, or as she put it, how to be a reasonable person. She thought that there must be something wrong in this confusion between politics and kissing politicians, and that an elder person ought to be able to help.
"I quite agree," she said, "that people are very interesting; only—" Rachel looked up enquiringly.
"Only I think you ought to discriminate," she ended. "It's a pity to be intimate with people who are—well, rather second-rate, like the Dalloways, and to find it out later."
"But how does one know?" Rachel asked.
"I really can't tell you," replied Helen candidly, after a moment's thought. "You'll have to find out for yourself. But try and— Why don't you call me Helen?" she added. "'Aunt's' a horrid name. I never liked my Aunts."
"I should like to call you Helen," Rachel answered.
"D'you think me very unsympathetic?"
Rachel reviewed the points which Helen had certainly failed to understand; they arose chiefly from the difference of nearly twenty years in age between them, which made Mrs. Ambrose appear too humorous and cool in a matter of such moment.
"No," she said. "Some things you don't understand, of course."
