Moths by Ouida — page 123: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. - 919 twho had played the part of Romeo till all life seemed to him a rose-garden, moonlit and made for serenades—these two might perhaps think with her! and understand this intent revolt, this passionate repugnance, this ceaseless sense of unendurable, indelible reproach. But those were all. Society would have given her no sympathy. Society would have simpered and sneered. To marry well-—that was the first duty of a woman. She had fulfilled it; she had been fortunate, how could she fail to be content? A heavy step trod the marble steps, and a heavy shadow fell across the sunlight; her husband approached her. “You are out without any shade; you will spoil your skin,” he said, as his eyes fell gloomily on her, for he noticed the shudder that passed over her as he drew near. She moved without speaking, where no sun fell, where the armless Cupid of the Vatican, copied in marble, stood among the roses of a hundred leaves. “How pale you are! That gown is too heavy for you. Do you like this place?” Al iy aes She said the word with an unconscious sound in it, that had the wonder of despair—despair which asked, what was there left in all the world to like or love? “Do you like it, I say,’ he repeated. “Most women rave about it. You seem as if it were a prison-house. Will you be always like that?’ “The place is beautiful,” she said, in a low tone. “Have I complained?” “No; you never complain. Thatis what annoys me. If you ever fretted like other women—but you are as mute as that marble, armless thing. Sometimes you make me afraid— afraid—that I shall forget myself, and strike you.” She was silent. “Would that you did strike sooner than embrace me!” she thought; and he read the unuttered thought in her eyes. “T do love you,” he said, sullenly, with some emotion. “You must know that; I have left no means untried to show it you.” “You have been very generous, monsieur!” “Monsieur! always monsieur!—it is ridiculous! I am your husband, and you must give me some tenderer word than that, After all, why cannot you be happy? You have all you want or wish for, and if you have a wish still unfulfilled, be it the maddest or most impossible, it shall be gratified if gold can do it; for I love you, you frozen child!” He bent his lips to hers; she shuddered, and was still. He kept his hand about ‘her throat, and gathered one of the roses of a hundred leaves, and set it against the pearls and her white skin; then he flung it into the sea roughly, “Roses do not become you; you are not a belle jardiniere; you are a statue. This place is dull; one tires of it; we will go to Russia. ‘Ag you please,” “Ags I please! Will you say nothing else all your life? (i ad “ comicboo \ ya A " he