This is Sasha’s description of her glittering English aristocratic lover, but she doesn’t seem particularly dazzled by his brightness. He appears to be burning up even as she is cooling down, and her attraction to him has something measured and even patronising about it. You sense she knows a great deal more than he about the world, but isn’t telling.
‘… he was like a million-candled Christmas tree (such as they have in Russia)…’
Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 52
