It was all old music--Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell--the pages yellow, the engraving rough to the finger.
In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction.

Now she stumbled; now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but an invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose a shape, a building.

She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together, and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock at the door.

It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs.Dalloway stood in the room leaving the door open, so that a strip of the white deck and of the blue sea appeared through the opening.

The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground.
"Don't let me interrupt," Clarissa implored.