Moths by Ouida — page 178: what you’re looking at

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

174 MOTHS. CHAPTER XVIL. | On the day following, Correze left Paris to fulfill his London engagements: it was the beginning of May. When his name disappeared from the announcements, and his erson fromthe scenes of the Grand Opera, then, and then alone, ere began-to realize all that thosenights at the lyric theater had been in her life. When she ceased to hear that one perfect voice, the whele world seemed mute. Those few hoursin each week had gone so far to solace her for the weariness, the haste, tbe barren magnifi- cence, and the tiresome adulation of her world—had done seo much to give her some glimpse of the ideal life, some echo of lost dreams, some strength to bear disillusion and disgust. The utter absence of vanity in her made her incapable of dreaming that Correze avoided hex because he remembered only too well. She fully thought he had forgotten her. What wasa morning by the sea, with a child. in the overfull life of a man foremost in art and in pleasure, consecrated at once to the Muses and the world? She was quite sure he had forgotten her. Even as he had recited the ‘‘ Nuit de Mai” his eyes had had no recog: nition in them. So she thought. : : This error made her memory of him tender, innocent, and wist- ful as a memory of the dead, and softened away all alarm for her from the emotion that possessed her. He was nothing to her—nothing—except a memory; and she was not even that to him. Paris became very oppressive to her. That summer Prince Zouroff, by Imperial command, returned to his estate in Russia, to complete the twelve months’ residence which had been commanded him. They were surrounded by a large house-party, wherever they resided, and were never alone. Vere fulfilled the social duties of her high station with grace, and courtesy, but he found her too cold, too negligent in society, and reproached her continually for seme indifference to punctilio, some oblivion of precedence. Neither her mind nor her heart was with these things. All of them seemed to her so trivial and so useless; she had been born with her mind and her heart both framed for greater ferce and . richer interest than the pomp of etiquette and ceremonial, the victories of precedence and prestige. They had made her a great lady, a woman of the world, a court beauty, but they could not destroy in her the temper of the stu- dious and tender-hearted child who had read Greek with her dogs about her under the old trees of Bulmer Chase. She had ceased to study because she was too weary, and she strove to steel and chill her heart because its tenderness ,could bring her no good; “i she could not change her nature. The world was always so ittle to her; her God and the truth were so much. She had been geared in the old fashion, and she remained of it. _ In the gorgeous routine of her life in Russia she always heard ii memory the echo of the Nuit de Mai. (E(o) Comicbooks