Moths by Ouida — page 318: what you’re looking at

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

O14 | MOTHS. for an instant into belief in her and belief in heaven; but against this instinct and against his faith the long habit of a brutal cynicism and a mocking doubt prevailed, and the devil in him, that had so long lived with the vile and the foolish of his world, drove him to answer her a bitter sneer. “Your words are grand,’ he said to her, “and. I believe you ‘mean them. Yes, you do not lie. But those fine things, my "¢ : princess, may last so long as ia woman is umtempted, but so — long only. You are iall Eve’s daughters.’ Then he bowed and left her. He hated himself for tthe thing he hiad said, but he could not have stayed the devil in him that uttered it. If his wife betrayed him that night,she knew that he would thiave nio title to condemn her; yet he thought, ashe went from her presence, if she did—if she did—he would slit the throat of her singing-bird, or of any other man, if any other it were. Vere stood erect, a somber disgust and revolt in her eyes. Her husband had said to her, “‘Thou fool! all sin alike; do thou jikewise.’’ In a few minutes she stooped and raised the fragments of the jewels anid the t'wisted and broken goldsmith’s work. It. was all shattered except the sapphire moth, She ghut the moth and all the shining, brilliant dust in a secret drawer of her jewel-case, then rang for her women. In another twenty minutes she entered her carriage, and drove in silence, with ther ‘husband ‘beside her, to the Rue de Grenelle. ‘‘Le Prince et la Princesse Zouroff,’ shouted the lackeys, standing in ia gorgeous line down the staircase of the embassy, CHAIPTER XXV. It was an April night when the necklace of the moth and the star perished under the heel of Zouroff; there were two months more through which the life in Paris lasted, for Zouroff adored the boulevards, even in summer months; the asphalte had a power to charm shim that even the grass of his forest drives never rivaled, and the warm nights of spring iand early summer found him driving down the Champs EHilysees to and from his various haunts, his carriage-lamps adding two stars the more to its long river of light. Coming home in the full daylight from this pleasures, he would at times meet ‘his wife going out in the clear hours of the early forenoon. He asked her once, roughly, where she was going, and she told him, naming the poorest quarter on the other side of the Seine. “Wihiy do you go to such a place?’ he asked her, as shie stood on the staircase. “There are poor there, ‘and great misery,’ she answered hiim, reluctantly; she did not care to speak of these things ait any time. “And what good will you.do? You will be cheated «and robbed; and, even if you are not, you should know that political science has found that private charity is the hotbed of all idle- ness.’’ “wi hen political science has advanced enough ito prevent pov- - | | fie -Eomicbooks J , f y ' Da K F 4 : ; ‘ : ; eal ANY JM ‘iy A ’ co }