Moths by Ouida — page 194: what you’re looking at

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

— yt ee 0 MOTHS. awake by raw meat and dry wines; cynical at twenty, and ex hausted at thirty, yet choosing rather to drop dead in the harnesé of pleasure than fall out of the chariot-race for an instant; taking their passions as they take sherry in the morning and bitters be- fore dinner; pricking their sated senses with the spices of lust or jealousy, and calling the unholy fever love; having out-worn every form of excitement except the gambler’s, which never palls, which they will still pursue when they shall have not areal tooth in their mouths nor a real hair on their heads, the women of modern society are perhaps at once the most feverish and the most frivolous, the basest and the feeblest, offspring of a false civilization. , There is no harm in them; that is the formula of society; there is no harm in them; only, at times, Medea looks almost holy, and Clytemnestra almost healthy, beside them. When one remembers that they, and those whom they so strongly resemble—who are a proscribed race, which they are not—are the only types of their sex that most men in society ever see, it is easy to understand why the old religion that made motherhood divinity loses its last hold on humanity, and the new ~ Positivism, that would make womanhood holy, gains no in: fluence on the mass of modern minds. Amidst these women Vere was like the marble of a Greek — statue amidst the Sale statuettes and Palais Royal dolls of a bazaar stall. She had no standing point in common with them, except her social rank. Their jargon, their laughter, their rivalries, their leasures, were all alike distasteful to her. When she drove over with them to Trouville at five o’clock and sat amidst them, within a stone’s throw of what the horrible pleasantry of society — calls the jolies impures, she thought that the levee that the pro- » scribed sisterhood held on those sands was quite as good as the levee of the great ladies around her. In return women hated her. ‘‘She isso farouche,” they said. They only meant that she was chaste, and that perfect chastity of thought, as well as of act, which the whole tone and tenor of society destroys in its devotees and ridicules in the. few cases where it cannot be destroyed. Only Jeanne de Sonnaz professed to admire, nay, to love, her. But then every one knew that Madame Jeanne was a clever woman, who said nothing and did nothing without a reason. ‘*Try to be amiable—if you know how to be amiable—with Madame de Sonnaz,” had been the command of Zouroff to his © wife on the first day that she and the French duchess had met; and Vere had been indebted to the brilliant Parisienne for many | a word of social counsel, many an indication of social perils, where the stiff frivolities of etiquette were endangered, or a dif- ficult acquaintance required tact to conciliate or rebuff it. Vere believed innocently and honestly that Jeanne de-Sonnaz liked her, and was angered with and reproached herself for not being “ne esate grateful, and for being unabie fully to return the r@ aan