Question

The following text is from Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party she is hosting, a task she finds both draining and essential to her life.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Gate's always did the arrangements so badly. ... What a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at an instant into the open air. In London, in an instant. ... Running through her veins a premonition of that rapture every spring morning felt, even now, with the traffic roaring and the passers-by, four years since she had been ill.
Which choice best states the main idea of the text? Choose 1 answer:
A Clarissa misses her childhood by the sea and dislikes her current life in London.
B Clarissa feels a fleeting sense of joy and vitality despite her age and recent illness.
C Clarissa believes that florists are generally incompetent and prefers to do things herself.
D Clarissa finds the noise of the London traffic to be overwhelming and unpleasant.

Answer 1

B

The passage emphasizes Clarissa's sudden, fleeting rapture and renewed vitality ("What a lark! What a plunge!" "running through her veins... every spring morning") despite having been ill four years earlier. The florist detail and London noise are incidental.