Katherine is harnessed to a "great" man, taught to remember her own insignificance in the face of his greatness. "One finds them [the Alardyces] at the tops of professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography." "They" are, of course, all men, and Woolf here launches an attack on the perpetuation of privilege through the patriarchal institutions which she would analye in" A Room of One's Own" and "Three Guineas."