When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, “Orlando?” For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not⁠—Heaven help us⁠—all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine⁠—and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him⁠—and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.

So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called “Orlando?” with a note of interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.

“All right, then,” Orlando said, with a good humour people practise on these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves to