Moths by Ouida — page 149: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. | 145) ae And Lady Dolly scribbled again in a tiny betting-book, bound in oxidized silver, that had cost fifty guineas in Bond Street. Lady Dolly was very fond of betting. As she practiced it, it was both simple and agreeable. She was always paid, and never ~ paid. ) The ladies who pursue the art on these simplified principles are humerous, and find it profitable. When Colonel Rochfort, a handsome young man in the Rifles, tried the next day to get her five hundred ‘‘ on,” at Newmarket, ee Ring was prudent: it would take it in his name, not in rs. But the men of her’world could not be as prudent—and as rude—as the Ring was. Besides, Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken > was still a very pretty woman, with charming little tricks of manner and.-a cultured, sagacious coquetry that was hard to re- sist; and she was very good company, too, ata little dinnerat the Orleans Club, when the nightingales sang, or tete-a-tete in her fan-iined octagon boudoir. . | Lady Dolly did not see: much of her daughter. Lady Dolly had taken seriously to London. London had got so much nicer, she said, so much less starchy, so much more amusing; it was quite wonderful how London had improved since polo and pigeon-shooting had opened its mind. Sundays were great fun in London now, and all that old nonsense about being so very particular had quite gone out. London people, the very best of them, always seemed, somehow or other—what should one say? —provincial, after Paris—yes, provincial; but still London was very nice, and Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken was quite a great erson in it; she had always managed so well that nobody ever ad talked about her. ‘‘Tt isso horrid to be talked about, you know,” she used to say, ‘‘and, after all, so silly to get talked about. You can do just as you like if you are only careful to do the right things at the right time and be seen about with the right people. Iam always so angry with those stupid women that are compromised: it is quite too dreadfully foolish of them, because, you know, really, nobody need be. People are always nice if one is nice to them.” | : So, from New Year to Midsummer she was in the house in Chesham Place, which she made quite charming with all sorts of old Italian things and the somber and stately Cinque Cento, ef- fectively, if barbarously, mixed up with all the extravagancies of modern upholstery. Lady Dolly’s house, under the combination of millinery and medizvalism, was too perfect, everybody said; and she had a new friend in her Sicilian attached to the Italian Legation, who helped her a great deal with his good taste, and — sent her things over from his grim old castles in Taormina; and it was a new toy and amused her; and her fancy-dress frisks, and her musical breakfasts, were great successes; and, on the whole, Lady Dolly had grown very popular. As for Mr, Vanderdecken, he was always stingy and a bear, but he knew how to behave. He represented a remote and peaceable borough, which he had bought as his wife bought a poodle or a piece of pate tendre; he ‘cComichoo it c ’ va ’ : OP iP La Spy! Nar A mes Vee AR We Pe | 4 yt e : has 4 S (elo) m