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- " ...
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.
Clarissa exclaimed that she could think of nothing more delightful. For an
instant she saw herself in her drawing-room in Browne Street with a Plato open
on her knees- Plato in the original Greek. She could not help believing that a
real scholar, if specially interested, could slip Greek into her head with
scarcely any trouble.