The text is taken by Virgina Woolf's modernism novel Mrs Dalloway and it's about a married woman. The extract deals about a morning, during spring or summer, of Mrs Dalloway's life.
The language is more similar to poetry language, because there is a lot of similes, and it is presented an anaphoric style: the narrator appeal to the sense so the narrator of Modernism novel wants the reader to feel and not to learn, and it wants reader feel the reality. That is to say narrator wants the reader feel exactly what characters feel.
To better understand the character, the intelligent reader can use the categories:
1. Information about social status of Mrs Dallowaya married woman, and it is the most important piece of information that the narrator gives to readers.
2. Information brought through flashbacks (fresh air, the meeting with Peter Walsh when Clarissa was 18).
3. The not chronological time of the novel (stream of consciousness, thoughts...)

More over the language uses create a rhythm (repetition of "progressive verbs"), typical of poetry.

The setting is the present and the past early morning according to Bergson's ideas about Time. It is summer or spring, and the reader understand it because the presence of good smelling, flowers, Nature, provide this idea.
The other character, Peter Walsh, is characterized by Mrs Dalloway's memory, and points out the great sense of humor of Clarissa.
The extract gives an idea about way of thinking of aristocracy: it follows the conform. There are textual clues around civilization and living.