Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. Maggie Gee

dry about it – I tried it on last of a pile of things, I was about to take it off and leave, but at the last second I turned up the collar in the mirror of the changing-room – and in that instant, looking back at me, boyish, over my shoulder was the ghost of a self I had been once, witty, wide-eyed, mischievous, young. I peered through the curtains and summoned Angela.

      ‘I want to keep this,’ I said, and laughed.

      ‘Why are you laughing?’ She sounded suspicious. ‘Did you choose the most expensive one?’

      It wasn’t her fault. Though she had good points, she constantly showed a side that was – common. I don’t like to use that word, of course one’s egalitarian, but Angela was obsessed with money. Perhaps she could not sell her books. When I inquired, she got rather angry & claimed she was actually ‘a best-seller’. I was fifty before I started making money, so I tried to judge her less severely.

      Today I will have money of my own! One does need money – I’ll try that again. We all need money and a room of our own – I must remember not to use the ‘one’, I have noticed it’s fallen out of fashion, as if no-one wants to be singular now. Everything is ‘we’ – they feel things in herds, the citizens of the twenty-first century.