Moths by Ouida — page 118: what you’re looking at

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

114 MOTHS. small pieces and let them float out into the golden dust of the sunlight of Paris. Her word had been given, and she was its slave. _ She looked at her mother, whom she had never called mother since that last night at the chateau of Abbaye aux Bais. ‘‘ Will you, if you please, spare me all those details?” she said, simply. ‘‘ Arrange everything as you like best, it will satisfy me. But let me hear nothing about it. That isall.” ‘You strange, dear creature! Any other girl——” began Lady Dolly, with a smile that was distorted, and eyes that looked away. Hi i am not as other girls are. I hope there is no other girl in all the world like me.” | Her mother made no answer. Through the stillness of the chambers there came the sounds of Paris, the vague, confused, loud murmur of trafiic and music, and pleasure and pain—the sounds of the world, the world to which Vere was sold. The words of the old recluse of Bulmer were very severe, but they were very true, and it was because of their truth that they seared the delicate nerves of the girl hke a hot iron. She did not well know what-shame was, but she felt that her own marriage was shame; andassne rolled home from the Bois that night through the bright streets of Paris, past the hotel in the Avenue de ’{mperatrice, that was to be her prison—house, she looked at the girls of the populace who were hurrying homeward from their workshops—flower-makers, glove-makers, clear-starchers, teachers of children, workers in factories—and she envied them, and followed them in fancy to their humble homes, and thought to herself, ‘‘ How happy I would be to work, if only I had a mother that loved me, a mother that was honest and good!” The very touch of her mother’s hand, the very sound of her langh and sight of her smile, hurt her; she had known nothing about the follies and vices of the world, until suddenly, in one moment, she had seen them all incarnated *n her mother, whose pretty graces and gayeties became terrible io her forever, as the pink and white loveliness of a woman beco ves to the eyes that have seen in its veiled breast a cancer. Vere had seen the moral cancer. And sh >could not forget it, never could she forget it. ‘* When she was once beloved by my father Y’ she thought; and she let her Bible lie unopened, lest, turning its leaves, she should see the old divine imprecations, the old bitter laws, that were in it against such women'as this woman, her mother, “was. One day in November her bethrothed husband arrived from Russia. The magnificence of his gifts to her was the theme of Paris. The girl was passive and silent always. ‘ apen he kissed her hands only she trembled from head to oot. ** Are you afraid of me?” he murmured. ** No; Iam not afraid.” | She cou!d not tell him that she felt diseuct-——diseust so great, so terrible, she could have sprung from the balcony and dashed herself to death upon the stones. iGO) a= a, ae) —— =r ~- - a-~ w