PARTISAN REVIEW
was now writing, and so on. All this information and a great deal more
Virginia in her merciless way extracted, and then laid before her friends,
discussing it with much sympathy, but from every angle, sometimes in
the presence of the victim. She had a passionate social curiosity about
the "high" the "middle" and the "low" (I am sure these distinctions of
class existed sharply in her mind). The British Royal Family was a
subject of intense interest for her, partly, 1 think because as an institu–
tion it was a supreme and fascinating example of male pretension which
she saw, gold-brocaded, strutting and stiff in her mind's picture of public
life. She could describe a dinner party where, as a young
girl,
she sat
next to Winston Churchill then (for the first time) First Lord of the
Admiralty and dressed in court dress, as though she were describing the
behavior of curious sea monsters seen through the glass window of an
aquarium. She could tell stories about Dame Ethyl Smythe, the very
eccentric British composer, until the tears ran down her cheeks. One of
these concerned a dinner party, given by the Woolfs in the country, to
which Dame Ethyl came. Dame Ethyl (who must have been about
seventy at the time) bicycled the twenty miles from the village where she
lived to the Woolfs' house, dressed in her bicycling costume of tough
tweed. About two miles from her destination, she decided that perhaps
she was not suitably dressed for a dinner party. There was little she
could do to remedy the situation, but she decided that an appropriate
gesture would be to buy corsets to straighten up her figure, sagging and
sweating rather after the miles up and down hill of Sussex roads. Ac–
cordingly, she went into a village shop and demanded in her military
voice some corsets. They had none. Very distressed she looked round
the shop and then suddenly sighted a bird cage, which, without expla–
nation she purchased. About twenty minutes later, Virginia went out
into her garden to search for Dame Ethyl who was by now rather late,
to find her in a state of undress in the shrubbery, struggling with a bird
cage which she was shaping into corsets and stuffing under her blouse.
There was an admirable detachment about Virginia Woolf. She
could talk about her own past with an objectivity which was quite
unambiguous. She was simply interested in the story that she was telling,
and the fact that she was involved in
it
was irrelevant. For example,
one evening she was talking about Rupert Brooke, and she said: "He
was very keen on upholding the 'free life.' One day he said: 'let's go
swimming without any clothes on.''' "And did you, Virginia?" someone
asked. "Of course, 1 did," she answered on a note of complete detach–
ment, and then she added thoughtfully: "Lytton always said that Rupert
had bandy legs. But 1 don't think that was so." One day she talked
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