Curious to use ‘scalding’, suggesting she was happy to have the present fall away from her, that in some respect it had been burning her.  It’s a good image for being freed of something which has injured you.

‘The present fell from her like drops of scalding water.’

Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 286

Photo credit: Holly Obermiller at unsplash.com