Moths by Ouida — page 150: what you’re looking at

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

146 : - MOTHS. © snored decorously on the benches of St. Stephen’s, and went te ministerial dinners, and did other duties of a rich man’s life, and for the rest of his time was absorbed in those foreign specula- tions and gigantic loans which constituted his business, and took him to Java, or Japan, or Jupiter, so often. He was large, ugtly, solemn, but he did extremely well in his place, which was an un- obtrusive one, like the great Japanese bonze who sat cross-leg- ged in the hall. What he thought no one knew; he was as mute on the subject of his opinions as the bonze was. In the new order of fashionable marriage a silence that must never be broken:is © the part allotted to the husband, and the only part he is expect- ed to take. On the whole, Lady Dolly was very contented. Now and then Jura would give her a somber glance, or Zouroff a grim smile, that recalled a time to her when she had been on the very brink ~ of the precipice, on the very edge of the outer darkness, and the recollection made her quite sick for the moment. Butthe qualm soon passed. She was quite safe now, and she had learned wis- dom. She knew how to be “so naughty and so nice” in the way that society in London likes and never punishes. She had been very silly sometimes, but she was never silly now, and meant never tobe silly any more. Shetempered roulette with ritualism, and always went to St. Margaret’s Church in the morning of a Sunday, if she dined down at the Orleans or at old Skindle’s in the evening. She had had a great ‘‘ scare,” and the peril and the fright of it had sobered her and shown her the way she should go. - For Lady Dolly was‘always veryicareful of appearances; she had no patience with people who were not. ‘‘Itis such very bad form to make people talk,” she would always say; ‘‘and it is so easy to stop their mouths.” Lady Dolly liked to go to court, to be intimate with the best people, to dine at royal tables, and to ‘‘be in the swim” alto- gether. Everybody knew she was a naughty little woman, but she had never been on the debatable land: she had never been one of the ‘‘ paniers a quinze sous;” she had never been coldly looked on by anybody, She never let ‘‘ Jack,” or anybody who preceeded or succeeded ‘‘ Jack,” get her into trouble. She liked to go everywhere, and she knew that if people once begin to talk you may very soon go nowhere. | She was not very wise in anything else, but she was very wise in knowing her own interests. Frightened and sobered, she had said to herself that it was a horrible thing to get any scandal about you; tofall out of society; to have to content yourself with third-rate drawing-rooms; to have to take your gayeties in ob- scure continental towns; to reign still, but only reign over a lot of shady, dubious declasse people, some with titles and some with- out, but all ‘‘nowhere” in the great race. It was a horrible thing; and she vowed to herself that never, never, should it be her fate. : , So she took seriously to the big house in Chesham Place, and her religion became one of the prettiest trifles in all the town. With her brougham full of hothouse flowers, going to the Children’s Hospital, or shuttling herself up and wearing black all €omicbooks (i o]