would be in darkness; and then for about half a minute again in the light. A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando. As the light faded, she began to feel steal over her the most delicious balm. “This is indeed a very great honour for a young woman, to be driving with Mr. Pope,” she began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. “I am the most blessed of my sex. Half an inch from me—indeed, I feel the knot of his knee ribbons pressing against my thigh—is the greatest wit in Her Majesty’s dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me with fury.” Here came the lamppost again. “What a foolish wretch I am!” she thought. “There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never cast a thought on me or on Mr. Pope either. What’s an ‘age,’ indeed? What are ‘we’?” and their blind progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was darkness. Her illusion revived. “How noble his brow is,” she thought (mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr. Pope’s forehead in the darkness). “What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom, and truth—what a wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter their lives! Yours is the only light that burns forever. But for you the human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness”; (here the coach gave a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) “without genius we should be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams”—thus she was apostrophizing the hump on the cushion when they drove beneath one of the street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realized her mistake. Mr. Pope had a forehead no bigger than another man’s. “Wretched man,” she thought, “how you have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you plain, how ignoble, how despicable you are! Deformed and weakly, there is nothing to venerate in you, much to pity, most to despise.”
Again they were in darkness and her anger became modified directly she could see nothing but the poet’s knees.