All these construals show that Rhoda is fundamentally incapable of acting on her environment. Moreover, she can hardly see, know or have things; she can only receive scorn and she is forced to lie, doubt and tremble. In the other world she conjures up, and in the two scenes which resemble this metaworld (the cat and the lovers), however, she is truly a Senser ( 'I who long for", 'I see some unembarrassed cat", 'I hate", 'I see the sky") and even an Actor ( 'the treasures I have laid apart", 'I rock my basins"). The immutability of this imagined world is evoked through the accumulation of intransitive material processes: 'the lovers crouch", 'the policeman stands sentinel", 'a man passes". So far, we have concentrated mainly on Rhoda"s incapacity to act in the real world. She appears to be equally incapable of interacting with other people. If we bear in mind that she is at a party, it is hard to imagine that people treat her with scorn and ridicule, but this is how she perceives it. Similarly, the 'arrows" which pierce her are more likely to be harmless questions, aimed at nothing more than a conversation. Yet, Rhoda feels oppressed by all these 'active" people coming into the room, and she cannot communicate with them, as opposed to Jinny and Susan, who do not have the slightest problem with conversation ( 'They say, Yes, they say, No"). In the first paragraph of the excerpt, for instance, Rhoda does not simply shake hands and chat with the man (the 'tiger"), but instead she does not know what to say and stands perplexed. In grammatical terms, this inability is not only expressed by the aforementioned modalization, but also by the use of material instead of verbal processes ( 'What answer shall I give", '(not composed enough) to make even one sentence"), and by the use of an inanimate Goal in the material transitive clause 'I must take his hand".