Beauty anyhow.  Not the crude beauty of the eye.  It was beauty pure and simple–Bedford Place leading into Russell Square.  It was straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done), stocking drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants.

Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.

–Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 159