Moths by Ouida — page 161: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. | £579 ahe get very angry with Zouroff, she is the sort of temper to go out of his house in her shift and leave everything behind her.” ‘‘What a picture?” said Lady Stoat, with a shudder. Nothing appalled Lady Stoat like the idea of any one being wrought upon to do anything violent. She would never admit that there could ever be any reason for it, or excuse. She had been an admirable wife to a bad husband herself, and _ she could not conceive any woman not considering her position before all such pettier matters as emotions and wrongs. When her daughter, who was of an impetuous disposition, which even the perfect training she had received had not sub- dued, would come to her in rage and tears because of the drunk- enness or because of the open infidelities of the titled Tony Lumpkin that she had wedded, Lady Stoat soothed her, but hardly sympathized. ‘‘ Lead your own life, my love, and don’t worry,’ she would say. ‘‘ Nothing can unmake your position, and no one, except yourself.” When her daughter passionately yvrotested that position was not all that a woman wanted at twenty years old, and with a heart not all trained out of her, Lady Stoat would feel seriously annoyed and injured. ‘*You forget your position,” she would reply. ‘‘ Pray, pray do not jeopardize your position. Let your husband go to music-halls and creatures if he must: it is very sad, certainly very sad. But it only hurts him; it cannot affect your position.” Further than that the light she possessed could not take her. She would not have been disposed to quarrel with the Princess Zouroff, as her own mother did, for not playing the fool at fancy fairs, but she would have thought it horrible, inexcusable, if, under the pressure of any wrong, the affront of infidelity, she had—in Lady Dolly’s figure of speech—left her husband’s house in her shift. ‘‘Never lose your position,” would have been the text that Lady Stoat would have written in letters of gold for all young wives to read, and it was the text on which all her sermons were preached. | Position was the only thing that, like old wine or oak furniture, | improved with years. If you had a good position at twenty, at forty you might be a power in the land. What else would wear like that? Not love, certainly, which’ indeed at all times Lady Stoat was disposed to regard as a malady—a green-sickness, in- avitable, but, to on-lookers, very irritating in its delirious non- sense. It was neither mere rank nor mere riches that Lady Stoat con- sidered a great position. It was the combination of both, with a power—inalienable except by your own act—to give the tone to those around you, to exclude all who did not accord with your own notions; to be unattainable, untroubled, unruffled, to bea ereat example to society; metaphorically to move through life with carpet always unrolled before your steps. When you had a position that gave you all this, if you had tact and talent enough to avail yourself of it; what could you by any possibility eed more? ; ‘comicboo!l