Moths by Ouida — page 171: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. 167 way of looking at such things, she is right: she was bought, uite as barbarously as Gerome’s slave. Only were she anybody else she would be reconciled by now—or be revenged. The only time I ever see her look in the least happy is at the opera, and there she seems as if she were dreaming; and once, at Svir, when we were driving over the plains in the snow, and they said the wolves were behind us—then she looked for the moment all brilliancy and courage; one would have said she was wiling to feel the wolves’ breath on her throat. But in the world she is never like that. What other women find excitement to her is monotony. Pleasure does not please her, vanity does not exist in her, and intrigue does not attract her: some day love will.” And then Madame Nelaguine would pull the little curls of her perruque angrily and light her cigar, and sit down to the piano, and compose her nerves with Chopin. ‘‘ As for Sergius, he deserves nothing,” she would mutter, as she followed the dreamy, intricate melodies of the great master. But then it was not for her to admit that to any one, and much less was itjfor her to admit it to his wife. Like most great ladies, she thought little of a sin, but she had a keen horror of a scandal, and, she was afraid of the future, very afraid of it. ‘‘Tf she were not a pearl, what vengeance she would take!” she thought again and again, when the excesses and indecencies of her brother’s career reached her ears. For sheforgot that she understood those as the one most out- gaged by them was very slow to do. Vere \still dwelt within the citadel of {her own innocence as within the ivory walls of an enchanted fortress. Little by little the corruption of life flowed into her and surrounded her like a fetid moat, but, though it approached her, it did not touch her, and often she did not even know that it was near. What she slid perceive filled her with a great disgust, and her husband Jaughed at her. In these short months of her life in Paris she felt as though she had lived through*centuries. 'Ten years in the old gray soli- {ude fof Bulmer would not have aged her morally or mentally as these brief months of the riot of society had done. She had drunk of the cup of knowledge of good and evil, and, though she had drunk with sinless lips, she could not entirely escape the poison the cup held. She hated the sin of the world, she hated the sensuality, the in- trigue, the folly, the insincerity, the callousness of the life of so- ciety, yet the knowledge of it was always within her like a bitter taste in the mouth. a | It hurt her uneceasingly; it aged her like the passing of many years. | In the beginning of the time she had tried to get some threads of guidance, some words of counsel, from the man who was her husband, and knew the world so well. The answers of Sergius ¥Youroff left her with a heavier heart and a more bitter taste. The chill cynicism, the brutal grossness, of his experiences tore and hurt the delicate fibers of her moral being, as the poisons.and <* i . ‘ ¢ (ee)