Quote 1
Still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships we founded; lectureships endowed [...] Hence the libraries and the laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves. (1.5)
Yep, cash rules everything around me. Note how Woolf exhaustively lists the material aspects of a fine university. What about the human capital?
Quote 2
What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? [...] Mary's mother [...] may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of it pleasures on her face. (1.28)
Mary's mother must have been a very busy woman... or women's poverty must be explained some other way. This quotation might remind you of what Woolf has to say about women's writing—that it is passed down from woman to woman, just like money. The better women's writing, the better later writing will be.
Quote 3
That collar I had spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. (1.2)
Woolf/Beton is really bummed that she has to have to try to write about something so divisive. It seems just the opposite of the free-flowing thought that Woolf thinks is so important. (Good thing she lived before Internet trolls.)