Orlando’s mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky potentates who happened to be staying there.
Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to the fact that Messrs. ⸻ (here he mentioned a well-known firm of publishers) would be delighted, if he wrote them a line, to put the book on their list. He could probably arrange for a royalty of ten percent on all copies up to two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers, he would himself write a line to Mr. ⸻, who was the most influential; then a compliment—say a little puff of her own poems—addressed to the wife of the editor of the ⸻ never did any harm. He would call ⸻. So he ran on. Orlando understood nothing of all this, and from old experience did not altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to submit to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself. So Sir Nicholas made the bloodstained packet into a neat parcel; flattened it into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with many compliments on both sides, they parted.
Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone—and she felt a bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry it—she had nothing to do but reflect upon whatever she liked—the extraordinary chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in St. James’s Street; a married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee house once there was now a restaurant; it was about half past three in the afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The thought popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old Greene were somehow the cause of it). And it may be taken as a comment, adverse or favourable, as the reader chooses to consider it upon her relations with her husband (who was at the Horn), that whenever anything popped violently into her head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired to him. There was one,