It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil.  How, then, are we also on the balcony, wearing pearls in June?

…when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes.  The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.  How beautiful a street is in winter!

-Virginia Woolf from Street Haunting: A London Adventure