Page:Orlando by Virginia Woolf.djvu/170

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ORLANDO

(It must be remembered that she was like a child, entering into possession of a pleasaunce or toycupboard; her arguments would not commend themselves to mature women, who have had the run of it all their lives.)

"But what used we young fellows in the cockpit of the Marie Rose to say about a woman who threw herself

overboard for the pleasure of being rescued by a blue jacket?" she said. "We had a word for them. Ah! I have it. . . ." (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme and passing strange on a lady's lips.) "Lord! Lord!" she cried again at the conclusion of her thoughts, "must I then begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can swim, if I have to be rescued by a blue-jacket, by God!" she cried, "I must!" Upon which, a gloom fell over her. Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of equivocation, to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a roundabout way of going to work. Yet, she reflected, the flowered paduasoy-the pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket-if these were only to be obtained by roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she supposed. She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. "Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires," she reflected; "for women are not (judging by my own short experi-

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