- As we're whisked back to Richmond, England in 1923, we find Virginia Woolf sitting in the printing room with her husband, Leonard, and his assistants.
- The Woolfs are working away on page proofs when the maid comes in to announce that Virginia's sister, niece, and nephews have arrived. They've come an hour and a half before they were expected, and Virginia is surprised.
- Virginia realizes that she doesn't look particularly good at the moment—she hasn't had time to do her hair or change into a nicer dress—but she goes and meets her sister, anyway.
- Virginia's sister tells her that the children are outside in the yard, deciding what to do with a dying bird that they found in the road.
- The sisters head outside and find the children kneeling in the grass. They're looking at the dying bird, and soon they decide to make a deathbed for it.
- Virginia helps her niece, Angelica, make a bed of grass for the bird, then watches as Angelica places roses carefully around the mound. When the youngest nephew, Quentin, lays the bird onto the bed, Virginia sees that it has already died in his hands.
- As Vanessa and the children begin to head inside, Virginia lingers for a few more moments beside the bird. As she looks at it, she decides that her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, won't die, after all.
- Instead of being "the bride of death," Virginia thinks, Clarissa will be "the bed in which the bride is laid" (10.64).