All 16 Uses of

presume

in

Mrs. Dalloway

Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify.†

presumably = probably

standard suffix: The suffix "-ably" is a combination of the suffixes "-able" and "-ly". It means in a manner that is capable of being. This is the same pattern you see in words like agreeably, favorably, and comfortably.

Still, he thought, yawning and beginning to take notice—Regent's Park had changed very little since he was a boy, except for the squirrels—still, presumably there were compensations—when little Elise Mitchell, who had been picking up pebbles to add to the pebble collection which she and her brother were making on the nursery mantelpiece, plumped her handful down on the nurse's knee and scudded off again full tilt into a lady's legs.†

It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution.†

And so there they lived, with their linen cupboards and their old masters and their pillow-cases fringed with real lace at the rate of five or ten thousand a year presumably, while he, who was two years older than Hugh, cadged for a job.†

What she would say was that she hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably; thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands in their pockets; must do something, be something; and these great swells, these Duchesses, these hoary old Countesses one met in her drawingroom, unspeakably remote as he felt them to be from anything that mattered a straw, stood for something real to her.†

And now Elizabeth was "out," presumably; thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother's friends.†

So there was a man outside; Evans presumably; and the roses, which Rezia said were half dead, had been picked by him in the fields of Greece.†

Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect which they showed this ambulance with its victim inside—busy men hurrying home yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or presumably how easily it might have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse...Ah, but thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust too over the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing any more—fatal to art, fatal to friendship.†

And here in Westminster was a retired Judge, presumably, sitting four square at his house door dressed all in white.†

So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson craned rather forward, and it wasn't so much she who minded not having any one to talk to (she hardly knew anybody there), for she felt that they were all such interesting people to watch; politicians presumably; Richard Dalloway's friends; but it was Richard himself who felt that he could not let the poor creature go on standing there all the evening by herself.†

Definitions:

(1) (presume as in: presumption of innocence)
to think of something as true or likely, even though it is not known with certainty

Something can be presumed because it seems reasonable or because there is a rule or law demanding such an assumption. For example, in the United States someone charged with a crime is presumed by law to be innocent unless they are proven guilty at a trial.
(2) (presumptuous as in: she is presumptuous)
exercising privileges to which one is not entitled -- such as being too familiar or too bossy