prepare for the party. Mrs. Woolf Meanwhile, two hours have passed since Virginia began writing the start of Mrs Dalloway. Reflecting on the uncertainty of the artistic process, she decides she has written enough for the day and is worried that if she continues her fragile mental state will become unbalanced; the onset of which she describes as her "headache". Virginia goes to the printing room (her husband Leonard has set up a printing press, the renowned Hogarth Press which first published Sigmund Freud in English and poet T. S. Eliot) where Leonard and an assistant, Ralph is at work. She senses from Ralph's demeanor the "impossibly demanding" Leonard has just scolded him for some inefficiency. Virginia announces she is going for a walk and will then pitch in with the work. "She might see it while walking with Leonard in the square, a scintillating silver-white mass floating over the cobblestones, randomly spiked, fluid but the whole, like a jellyfish. 'What's that?' Leonard would ask. 'It's my headache', she'd answer. 'Please ignore it.' " —Virginia reflecting on the detached nature of her mental illness, p. 70, 1999, 4th Estate paperback edition. "She decides, with misgivings, that she is finished for today. Always, there are these doubts. Should she try another hour? Is she being judicious, or slothful? Judicious, she tells herself, and almost believes it." —Virginia, p. 72, 1999, 4th Estate paperback edition. "The truth, she thinks, sits calmly and plumply, dressed in matronly gray, between these two men." —Virginia reflecting on whose attitude towards work, the carefree Ralph's, or the "brilliant and indefatigable" Leonard's, has resulted in the two men's conflict, p. 73, 1999, 4th Estate paperback edition. Mrs. Brown In parallel imagery to Virginia Woolf's, Laura Brown also goes about an act of creation: making Dan's birthday cake. Richie is helping her, and Laura passes through emotions of intense love for, and annoyance with, Richie. Laura wants desperately to desire nothing more than the life she has as a wife and mother, to be making a cake, and sees both the cake-making and her present lot in life as her art, just as writing is Virginia Woolf's art: "She will not lose hope. She will not mourn her lost possibilities, her unexplored talents (what if she has no talents, after all?). She will remain devoted to her son, her husband, her home and duties, and all her gifts.