uncomfortable feeling—one must never, never say what one thought. (She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.) They made one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody else. (The tears formed themselves in her eyes.) For really, she thought, pushing a little boat off with her toe, I don’t think I could (here the whole of Sir Nicholas’s article came before her as articles do, ten minutes after they are read, with the look of his room, his head, his cat, his writing-table, and the time of the day thrown in), I don’t think I could, she continued, considering the article from this point of view, sit in a study, no, it’s not a study, it’s a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day long, and talk to pretty young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which they mustn’t repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles; and then, she continued, weeping bitterly, they’re all so manly; and then, I do detest Duchesses; and I don’t like cake; and though I’m spiteful enough, I could never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and write the best English prose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed, launching a penny steamer so vigorously that the poor little boat almost sank in the bronze-coloured waves.
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses call it)—and the tears still stood in Orlando’s eyes—the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband’s brig; and the wave she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn; and as she watched the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop’s ship climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the thousand deaths it went and disappeared—“It’s sunk!” she cried out in an agony—and then, behold, there it was again sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on the other side of the Atlantic.