“Time has passed over me,” she thought, trying to collect herself; “this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors—as I do now,” here she stepped on to the pavement of Oxford Street, “what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?” Her eyes filled with tears.
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her motorcar with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And, indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business—this timekeeping; nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose her shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or the boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motorcar, the present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently assaulted.