Page:Orlando by Virginia Woolf.djvu/221

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ORLANDO

dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me with fury." Here came the lamp post again. "What a foolish wretch I am!" she thought. "There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never cast a thought on me or on Mr. Pope either. What's an 'age,' indeed? What are we?" and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was darkness. Her illusion revived. "How noble his brow is," she thought (mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr. Pope's forehead in the darkness). "What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom and truth—what a wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter their lives! Yours is the only light that burns for ever. But for you the human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness"; (here the coach gave a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) "without genius we should be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams,"—thus she was apostrophising the hump on the cushion when they drove beneath one of the street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realised her mistake. Mr. Pope had a forehead no bigger than another man's. Wretched man," she thought, "how you have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you plain, how ignoble,

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