- After starting us off with the death of Virginia Woolf, The Hours begins its first true chapter with flowers and a party.
- We're now in New York City at some point in the 1990s, and a woman named Clarissa Vaughan is stepping out of her West Village home on a sunny June morning, on her way to buy flowers for the party that she'll be throwing that night.
- As Clarissa walks to the florist's, she takes in the sights and sounds of her neighborhood and reflects on a cherished memory from her youth—a summer morning when she was eighteen years old and in love with her friend Richard Brown, who nicknamed her Mrs. Dalloway.
- When Clarissa stops to wait for the light "at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue," she is observed by a random passer-by.
- Clarissa walks on, and soon she runs into an acquaintance—a successful and well-known novelist named Walter Hardy.
- Clarissa and Walter stop to chat, and Clarissa invites Walter and his partner Evan to the party she's throwing that night. As we now learn, the party is being thrown in Richard's honor, to celebrate the fact that he's being given a prestigious literary award called the Carrouthers Prize.
- As she invites Walter and Evan to the party, Clarissa realizes that Richard will probably hate having Walter there. Richard believes that Walter is trivial and shallow, and he seems to suspect that Clarissa is "a little vain and foolish herself" for liking him (1.25).
- Clarissa and Walter part ways, and Clarissa keeps on thinking of Richard as she walks. As she does, we learn that Richard is slowly succumbing to AIDS, and his good days are growing fewer and farther between.
- Soon, Clarissa pauses in front of a bookstore on Spring Street, thinking that it might be nice to buy a gift for Walter's partner, Evan, who is also living with AIDS.
- Clarissa eventually decides that none of the books on display would convey the right message, and so she continues on toward the florist's as her thoughts turn towards her daughter, Julia.
- When Clarissa reaches the florist's, she chats with the proprietor, Barbara, and gets to work choosing flowers for her party.
- As she and Barbara move around the room, they hear "a huge shattering sound" from the street. The two women go to the window to look, and Clarissa decides that it must have come from "the movie people"—a film crew that's been working out in the street "all morning" (1.45).
- Barbara moves away from the window, but Clarissa stays put for a few more seconds. Suddenly, she sees "a famous head" emerge from one of the trailers at the film site (1.47). She can't quite place it—she thinks it may have been Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave—but "she knows without question that the woman is a movie star" (1.47).
- As the star pulls her famous head back inside her trailer, Clarissa watches from the window and reads the subtle social atmosphere of the scene.