From a distance the Euphrosyne looked very small...Mr. Pepper with all his learning had been mistaken for a cormorant, and then, as unjustly, transformed into a cow. At night, indeed, when the waltzes were swinging in the saloon, and gifted passengers reciting, the little ship - shrunk to a few beads of light out among the dark waves, and one high in air upon the mast-head - seemed something mysterious and impressive to heated partners resting from the dance. She became a ship passing in the night- an emblem of the loneliness of human life, an occasion for queer confidences and sudden appeals for sympathy.”
-- Narrator (chapter 7)

Importance: This passage exemplifies Woolf's style of alternating between the minute details of individual characters and the grand scale of the world. The characters whom we have been observing up to this point (the Vinraces, the Dalloways, the Ambroses) are shown to be small, their...