London morning, 26th October 1928

"Next day the light of the October morning was falling in dusty shafts through the uncurtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose from the street.  London then was winding itself up again; the factory was astir; the machines were beginning.  It was tempting after all this reading to look out of the window and see what London was doing on the morning of the 26th of October 1928.  And what was London doing?  Nobody, it seemed, was reading Antony and Cleopatra.  London, it appeared, was wholly indifferent to Shakespeare's plays.  Nobody cared a straw -- and I do not blame them -- for the future of fiction, the death of poetry or the development by the average woman of a prose style completely expressive of her mind.  If the opinions upon any of these matters had been chalked on the pavement, nobody would have stooped to read them.  The nonchalance of the hurrying feet would have rubbed them out in half an hour."

A Room of One's Own  Virginia Woolf