Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now?

He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person.  Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind.    He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds;  he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. 

Virgina Woolf's, Tilda Swinton's and Sally Potter's Orlando