Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday. This last phrase "the life of Monday or Tuesday", is what Woolf believed to be at the core of fiction; and from it came the title of this, her first short story collection, and the only selection she published herself.