Moths by Ouida — page 269: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS 268 - which to her, in whom were all the old faiths and purities of a forgotten creed, seemed a sin. | Asin! Did the world know of suchathing? Hardly. Now and then, for sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless boy, or some still yet unhappier woman, and pilloried one of them, and drove them out under a shower of stones, selecting - them by caprice, persecuting them without justice, slaying them because they were friendless. But this was ail. For the most part sin was an obsolete thing, archaic and un- heard of; public prints chronicled the sayings and the doings of Noisette and Casse-une-Croute ; society chirped and babbled mer- rily of all the filth that satirists scarce dare do more than hint at lest they fall under the law. There was no longer in her eyes the blindness of an innocent, unconscious youth. She saw corrup- tion all around her—a corruption so general, so insidious, so lightly judged, so popular, that it was nearly universal; and amidst it the few isolated souls that it could not taint and claim and absorb were lost as in a mist, and could not behold one an- other. A dull confusion weighed upon her brain. Her husband had counseled her to lose herself in chiffons and in conquests! It seemed to her as vile-as when, in the old familiar story that childhood loves, the husband had let his wife ride naked through the streets of Coventry. She knew very well he would not care; nay, that he would perhaps like her the better. As he had often bidden her put red upon her cheeks, so he would have awakened to a quicker.esteem of her 1f he had seen her leaving ball-rooms in the light of morning, with the ribbons of the cotillons on her breast, smiling on her lovers above the feathers of her fan, pro- voking with effrontery the gaze of men, answering every avowal with smiling reproof that meant forgiveness, and passing gayly through the masque of society with kohl around her eyes, and a jest upon her mouth, and hidden in her bosom or her bouquet some royal lover’s note. He would have esteemed her more high- ly so. Perhaps then she might even have stood higher in his eyes than Casse- une-Croute. ; “yaa She thought this as she sat in the evening at his table, with her Imperial guests beside her, and before her eyes the glow of the gold plate with the Zouroff crown uponit. She was as white as ivory; her eyes hada somber indignation in them; she wore her Order of St. Catherine and her necklace of the moth and the star. : ‘¢ Tf one did not keep to honor, for honor’s sake,” she thought, ‘¢- what would he not make me—I should be viler than any one of them,” For, as she'saw her husband’s face above that broad gleam of gold, the longing for one instant came over her, with deadly temptation, to take such vengeance as a wife can always take, and teach him what fruit his own teachings brought, and make him the byword and mock of Europe. The moment passed. Wi ‘¢‘ He cannot make me vile,” she thought. ‘Noone can—save myself.” comicboo hi . y\ ~ MN \ é 4