Moths by Ouida — page 126: what you’re looking at

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

Me wow 199 i ) MOTHS. loves the child that is born of her ruin: and I am not like that Perhaps I am wicked; can you understand ?” ** Yes, yes; I understand,” said the Princess Nelaguine, hurs riedly, and, though she was accounted in her generation a false and heartless little woman of the world, her eyes became dim and her hands pressed Vere’s with a genuine pity. Long, long years before, Nadine Zouroff had herself been given to a love- less marriage, when all her life seemed to her to be lying dead in a soldier’s unmarked gravein the mountains of Caucasus. ‘That feeling will change, though, be assured,” she said, » soothingly. ‘‘ When we are very young, all our sorrow is despair; but it does not kill us, and we live to be consoled. Once I felt like you—yes, but now I have many interests, many ties, many occupations, and my sons and daughters are dear to me, though they were not his; so will be yours, to you, in time.” Vere shuddered. ** People are different,” she said, simply; ‘‘to me it will always be the same.” She pulled a cluster of white roses, and ruffled them in her hands, and threw them down, almost cruelly. “Will those roses bloom again?” she said. ‘‘What I did to them your brother has done to me. It cannot be altered now. Forget that I have said anything. I will not again.” One year had gone by since Vere had been given, with the blessing of her mother and the benison.of society, ta the Minotaur of a loveless marriage. To herself she seemed so utterly changed that nothing of her old self was left in her, body or soul. To the world she only seemed to have grown lovelier, as was natural — with maturer womanhood, and to have become a great lady in lieu of a graceful child. She was little more than seventeen now, but, herself, she felt as if centuries -had rolled over her head. Aiter her winter at the Imperial court, she had been so changed that she would at times wonder if she bad ever been the glad and thoughtful child who had watched the North Sea break itself in foam in the red twilight of Northumbrian dawns. She had a horror of herself. She had a horror of the world. But from the world and from herself there was now no escape. She was the Princess Zouroff. An immense disgust possessed her, and pervaded all her life, falling on her as the thick gray fog falls on a sunny landscape— heavy, dull, and nauseous, | The loveliest and youngest beauty in the Salle des Palmiers, with the stars of her diamonds shining on her like the planets of a summer night, she was the saddest of all earthly creatures. The girl who had gone to, bed with the sun and risen with it, who had spent her tranquil days in study and open-air exercise, who had thought it pleasure enough to find the first primrose, and triumph enough to write the three letters at the footof a hard problem, who had gone by her grandmother's side to the _ old dusky church, where noble and simple had knelt together for a thousand years, and who had known no more of the evil and m1 | Fs Aaah ‘comicbooks.co : 9 i mm y : } te a ky L