Although Mrs. Hilbery muses in a letter to her sister-in-law that “one doesn’t know any more, does one? One hasn’t any advice to give one’s children” (p. 126), she is still eager to see Katharine married, and admits, “I don’t believe in sending girls to college” (p. 86). She also bemoans the previous generation’s “vitality” that “we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning” (p. 103).

Even more staunchly conservative is William Rodney. “A man naturally alive to the conventions of society,” Woolf mockingly writes, “he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him” (p. 215). Marriage, to him, is the sum and glory of a woman’s existence, and while Katharine, in a revealing scene, stares distractedly at the skies, Rodney rhapsodizes on the joys of wedlock:

“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?” said Katharine, with her eyes fixed on the moon.
“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you’re nothing at all without it; you’re only half alive; using only half your faculties; you must feel that for yourself” (p. 56).

Rodney admires Katharine’s beauty and intelligence, but he is also deeply threatened by her unwillingness to admire him uncritically: “Beneath her steady, exemplary surface,” he reflects, “ran a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of him and his doings” (p. 214). Not long after Katharine has rejected Rodney’s first proposal of marriage, he indignantly remarks to Denham:

“She lives... one of those odious, self-centred lives—at least, I think them odious for a woman—feeding her wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a sense, feeling that every one is at her feet.... She has taste. She has sense. She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a woman, and there’s an end of it” (pp. 60-61).

As his feeble attempts at poetry make hilariously clear, Rodney’s blind allegiance to the past has a cost: an inflexibility that makes him sadly unfit for the complex demands of modern life and love.

But Katharine, as is only proper for a heroine, does not yield to propriety’s pull so easily. Whether working on her grandfather’s biography or simply wandering around her house, she feels both drawn to and overwhelmed by the past:

Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition (p. 35).

Yet even though “a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead” (p. 32), Katharine also has a fine and searching mind of her own. Alone among the Hilberys, she has a passion for mathematics, rather than for more traditional accomplishments like music or poetry. This passion gives rise to guilt as well as rapture:

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of her grandfather (pp.