As Clarissa prepares for the party she thinks of the famous actor Sally is lunching with, a B-movie action star who recently came out as gay. This sparks ruminations on why she, Clarissa, was not invited to lunch and again towards thoughts of the worth of her life. In her mind, she is "only a wife" (p94). Clarissa tries to be grateful for the moment she is inhabiting, cutting the stems off roses at the kitchen sink. She thinks of the holiday she had when she was eighteen with Louis and Richard, a time when "it seemed anything could happen, anything at all" (p95). She thinks of kissing Richard, a dramatic reversal of the kiss Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway shares with a girl when she was young. Clarissa (Vaughan) realizes without that holiday and the house where she, Richard and Louis spent it, so many events would not have occurred, including this moment now, standing in a kitchen cutting flowers for her best friend, Richard's, party. She remembers telling herself at the time she was not betraying Louis by sleeping with Richard, it was the free-wheeling 1960's, Louis was aware of what was going on. She wonders what might have happened if she had tried to remain with Richard. She imagines that other future, "full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave...She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself." "Or then again maybe not," Clarissa thinks. She realizes that maybe there is nothing equal to the recollection of having been young. She catalogues the moment she and Richard kissed for the first time, by a pond's edge at dusk. "It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years, to realize that it 'was' happiness...Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."