The wondrous whimsy of this sentence shows the hand of a writer so confident in her craft that she can self-mock, choreograph a textual performance with abandon and eight semi-colons, and embody in an act of deconstruction her mastery of the tools she has made from her own ideas. Mixing metaphors, Woolf is a juggler, throwing all the balls in the air, and still holding the pattern of form and order when the sentence settles. In a radical act of textual and literal housekeeping (much like that of the old cleaning woman in the sentence), with a bold clearing of the textual space, Woolf enacts the scrubbing clean of the canvas, the rubbing out of the meanings and the words. She shows not only the brush strokes, but also the rag that wipes them clean, and as she says, mockingly, this clearing work only takes one old woman half an hour. When the change comes, it comes fast. It lets in the air, the light and the colour of a new perception. It breaks the bond between words and old meanings, and enacts the undoing of mimetic representation.