What metaphors are used in The New Dress by Virginia Woolf?

When Rose Shaw tells Mabel that her dress is "perfectly charming," Mabel, skeptical of the compliment, bitterly begins her metaphor of the flies: "We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer." Mabel immediately, however, changes her mind and notes that "she could not see them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that." Mabel is so insecure in herself that she ultimately turns even her criticism of others around on herself.