Moths by Ouida — page 235: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS rhein 93% longed for him to believe her guiltless of the low ambitions of the world; she could not bear that he should fancy the low pene of the world’s wealth and rank had ever had power @,er ner, Yet she was the wife of Sergius Zouroff. What could she - hope to make him think in face of that one fact? uddenlyihe looked up at her; his brilliant eyes were dim with tears, yet flashed darkly with a somber indignation. “T understand,” he said, at last, his old habit of quick and eloquent speech returning to him. ‘‘I think I have always un- derstood without words; I think all the world does. And that is why one half of it at least has no forgiveness for you, princess.” He added the title with a little effort; it was as a curb on hig memory, on his impulse; he set it as a barrier between him and her, ‘‘It is I who do not understand,” said Vere, with a faint smile, and an accent of interrogation. She did not look away from the wood-flowers. His eyes fed themselves on the lines of her alelicate and noble features; he breathed quickly: the color came — into his face. ‘¢No, you do not understand,” he said, rapidly. ‘‘ There is your danger. There is your weakness. Do you know what it costs to be an innocent womanin the world you live in?—the great world, as it calls itself, God help us! To be chaste in mind and body, thought and deed, to be innocent in soul and substance, not merely with sufficient abstinence from evil not to endanger position, not merely with physical coldness that can deny the passions it is diverted to influence, but real chastity, real inno- cence, which recoils from the shadow of sin and shrinks from the laughter of lust. Do you know what the cost of such is? I will tell you. Their cost is isolation; the sneer they are branded with is ‘ out of fashion;’ no one will say it, perhaps, but all will make you feel it. If you be ashamed to go half clothed, if you be unwilling to laugh at innuendoes, if you be unable to under- stand an indecency in a song, or a gag at a theater, if you do not find a charm in suggested filth, if you do not care to have loose women for your friends, however high may be their rank, if adultery look to you all the worse because it 1s a domestic pet and plaything, and if immorality seem to you but the more shameful because it is romped with at the children’s’ hour, danced with at the queen’s ball, made a guest at the house-par- ties, and smuggled smilingly through the customs-officers of so- ciety—if you be so behind your time as this, you insult your generation; you are a reproach to it, and an ennwt. The union of society is a Camorra or Mafia. Those who are not of it must at least subscribe to it and smile onit, or they are lost. There is your danger, my Princess of Truth. How can they forgive you, any one of them, the women who have not your loveliness and your mind, and to whom youare a perpetual, an unconscious, an inexorable rebuke? Clothed with innocence is metaphor and fact with you; and do you understand the womer of he world go little yet as not to understand that they would pardon you the comicbooks . tate per | co aS rs "i re SUS