Moths by Ouida — page 143: what you’re looking at

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

tr . | MOTHS. ee 199 may reap. Norif he had remembered would he have cared. Loute femme triche was engraved on his conviction as‘a certain doctrine. The purity and the simplicity and the serious sense of right and wrong that he discovered in Vere bewildered him, and half awed, half irritated him. But that these would last after contact with the world, he never for a moment believed, and he quickly ceased to regard or to respect them. He knew very well that:his wife and his belles petites were creatures so dissimilar that it seemed scarcely possible that the same laws of nature had created and sustained them, the same humanity claimed them. He knew that they were as unlike as the dove and the snake, as the rose and the nightshade, but he treated them both the same. There was a woman who was seen on the Bois who drove with white Spanish mules hung about with Spanish trappings, and had a little mulatto boy behind her dressed inscarlet. This eccentric person was speedily celebrated in Paris. She was handsome in a very dark, full-lipped, almond-eyed, mulattress fashion; she got the name of Casse-une-Croute, and no one ever heard or cared whether she ever had had any other. Casse-une-Croute, who was a mustang from over the seas, had made her debut. modestly with a banker, but she had soon blazed into that splendor in which bankers, unless they are Rothschilds, are despised. Prince Zouroft had seen-the white mules, and been struck with them, Casse-une-Croute had an apotheosis. _ There was an actress who was called Noisette; she was very handsome too, in a red and white way, like Rubens’ women; she, too, drove herself, but drove a mail-phaeton and very high-step- ping English horses; she drank only Burgundy, but plenty of it; she had a hotel entre cour et jardin; on the stage she was very vulgar, but she had du chien and wonderful drolleries of expres- sion. Prince Zouroff did not care even to look at her, but she was the fashion, and he had taken her away from his most inti- mate friend; so, for years, he let her eat his roubles as a mouse eats rice, and never could prevail on his vanity to »reak with her, lest men should think she had broken with him. In that unexplainable, instinctive way in which women of quick perceptions come to know things that no one ever tells hom: and which are never definitely put before them in words, Princess Zouroff became gradually aware that Noisette and Casse- une-Croute were both the property of her husband. The white mules of the mail-phaeton crossed her own carriage-horses a dozen times a week in the Champs Elysees, and she looked away not to see those women. and said, in the bitter humiliation of her heart, ‘‘ What am I better than either of them?” When either of them saw her, Casse-une-Croute said, ‘‘ V’la la petite!” con- temptuously. Noisette said, ‘‘ /e mangerat meme ses diamants a elle.” ‘‘ Sergius,” said Nadine Nelaguine, one night, “‘in that wife that you neglect for your creatures you have a pearl of price.” ‘‘And I am one of the swine, and best live with my kind,” said her brother, savagely, because he was ashamed of. himself, (alo) ‘comicbooks