ORLANDO
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper. "I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones," and she paced down the long gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire (for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.
How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry. Then—it was the effect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps,—into this high frenzy was let fall some black drop, which turned her rhapsody to sluggishness. Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne, whose book was at her hand there. She had formed here in solitude after her affair with Greene, or tried to form, for Heaven knows, these growths are age-long in coming, a spirit capable of resistance. "I will write," she had said, "what I enjoy writing"; and so had scratched out twenty-six volumes. Yet still for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings and turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the future might bring,
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