The shift from the party to Mabel's memory of Miss Milan's workroom and then back to the party primarily serves to

“But, my dear, it's perfectly charming!” Rose Shaw said, looking her up and down with that little satirical pucker of the lips which she expected. Rose herself was dressed in the height of the fashion, precisely like everybody else, always.

We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she were trying to find some spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable.

Now she could see flies crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk with their wings stuck together; and she strained and strained to make herself see Rose Shaw and all the other people there as flies, trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. But she could not see them like that, not other people.

She saw herself like that. She was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.

“I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,” she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear her say that, just to reassure herself by showing how detached she was, how witty, that she did not feel in the least out of anything.

And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something, quite polite, quite insincere, which she saw through instantly, and said to herself, directly he went, “Lies, lies, lies!” For a party makes things either much more real, or much less real, she thought; she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert Haydon's heart; she saw through everything. She saw the truth. THIS was true, this drawing-room, this self, and the other false.

Miss Milan's little workroom was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage cooking; and yet, when Miss Milan put the glass in her hand, and she looked at herself with the dress on, finished, an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there, a beautiful woman.

And now the whole thing had vanished. The dress, the room, the love, the pity, the looking-glass, and the canary's cage had vanished, and here she was in a corner of Mrs. Dalloway's drawing-room, suffering tortures, woken wide awake to reality.