Moths by Ouida — page 146: what you’re looking at

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

i 7) MOTHS. never will urderstand them. Or perhaps, on the other hand, | some day she will.” “* Vous plaisantez, madame,” said Sergius Zouroff, with a growl, as the duchess laughed. | A sullen resentment rose in him against Vere. He had meant to forget her, once married to her. The marriage had been a caprice; he had been moved to a sudden passion that had been hightened by her aversion and her reluctance; shejdid as wellas another to bear children and grace his name; he had never meant to nvake a burden of her, and now every one had agreed to speak of her as amartyr to her position. Her position! he thought; what woman in Europe would not have been happy in it? | Vere herself might have fanciful regrets and fantastic senti- ments; that he could admit; she wasachild, and had odd thoughts and tastes; but he resented the pity for her—pity for her as being his—that spoke by the cynical lips of his sister and Jeanne de Sonnaz. | _ He began almost to wish that she would be brought to under stand the necessity de’ s’encanailler. There are times when the very purity of a woman annoys and oppresses a man—even when 6he is his wife; perhaps most of all when she is so. If she had disobeyed him or had any faultagainst him, he could stilllhave found some pleasure in tyranny over her; but she never rebelled, she never opposed Lim. Obedience was all she had to give, and she gave it in all loyalty; her grandmother had reared her in old-world ideas of duty that she found utterly out of place in the day she lived in, yet she clung to them as she clung to her belief in heaven. Her whole nature recoiled from the man to whom she owed obedience, yet she knew obedience was his due, and she gave it. Although he would have borne with nothing less, yet this pas- sive submission had begun to irritate him; his commands were caprices, willful, changeable, and unreasonable. But, as they bea always obeyed, it ceased to be any amusement to impose em. | He began to think that she was merely stupid. He would have believed that she was quite stupid, and noth- ing else, but for a certain look in her eyes now and then when she spoke, a certain gesture that occasionally escaped her of utter contemptand weariness. Then he caught sight fora mo- ment of depths in Vere’s nature that he did not fathom, of pos- sibilities in her character that he did not take into consideration. Had she been any other man’s wife, the contradiction would have attracted him, and he would have studied her temper and her tastes. As it was, he only felt some irritation, and some ennui because bis wife was not like his world. ° ~ “Sheis not amusing, and she is not grateful,” he would say, and each day he saw less of her, and left her to shape her own life as she chose. .