Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 119: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HER ROYAL LOVER. 111 approach him. This girl was not one of the Parisian ladies maids, never taken unawares, having always upon the end of the tongue a lie which they deliver like gospel verse; she was a coarse Caucasian peasant, who for money would have sold her soul; a veritable feminine rustic, with sufficient appren- ticeship she would have quickly accustomed herself in the methods of the lies and treasons of her class. It was not the evil instincts that were wanting in her, but simply the practice of profligacy. She had not yet had the opportunity to grow acute. Glascha once gone, Mineleko could at last abandon himself entirely to the frenzy, the indignation, the grief, which were alternately rending him. The king dared to invite him—him! whom he had perhaps so ~ abominably betrayed! Alas! colossal Bluebeard, yoked to his refined and nervous wife, he had perhaps been guilty of great wrongs toward her; these wrongs, he excused by - the innumerable tortures that his jealousy had made him endure. Poor woman, how often he had abused her without cause! But this bear, accustomed to drink hardlv, to command rudely, this Don Juan habituated hitherto to frivolous manners, to facile mistresses, this indefatigable Nimrod of the icy steppes of his country, could he ever hope to raise himself to the heavens where this sensitive creature hovered, whom he adored without comprehending. Certainly, his manner of loving, almost bestial, _ taken all and all, was not that which would have been necessary to Najeska Ivanowna, whose lively and exhalted imagination had dreamed of the poetic songs of a delicate troubadour sighing unceasingly near her. How far from the ideal of the romantic young girl was the reality of her existence to the Eomichbooks.com