In general, this long scene is one of reflection. Like Clarissa, who has been ill and has "returned" to London, Peter also has been away; he is returning to London after five years spent in India. As Clarissa did, Peter sees London through unaccustomed eyes. He notices subtle nuances, and revels in being a part of, and within, a metropolis. Also, as Clarissa did, Peter considers not only present time but also past time. Especially since he has just left Clarissa, he pauses to wonder, particularly about the "success" of each of their lives. We learn a good deal more now about the circumstances of Peter and Clarissa's estrangement and also more about Peter himself. Through an interior monologue, Virginia Woolf slips us chunks of exposition and a resume of Peter's character without ever seeming to interrupt the flow of the story.
Almost everything we learn about Peter and about the past is washed with irony. In the last scene, Clarissa imagined Peter free; she ached for freedom such as his. Here, however, we see that Peter is not as "free" as Clarissa imagines. He is free, but he is caged in loneliness. Clarissa and her set (that is, the Establishment) have rejected him. He has conformed to the requirements of his class insofar as he did go to India, "to the colonies," but he has always been an outsider. He does not, like Clarissa and Richard Dalloway, conform to the letter of the rules. When he was with Clarissa, we saw symbolic evidence of Peter's nonconformity. He played nervously with a pocketknife; he pared his nails; ecstatically, he confessed his love for a married woman. In contrast to Clarissa's conduct, Peter was not, by definition, an English gentleman whereas Clarissa, until she ran to cry after Peter, seemed the epitome of a disciplined English lady. In short, Peter has shown little social discipline.
