Moths by Ouida — page 343: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. pei $39 she would walk up and down the paneled rooms ¢1: ugh those midnight hours, that seemed like an eternity, and wonder if her husband had wished to drive hex mad that bh3 nad sent her here. Her French women left her, unable to bear #23 cold, the dreari- ness, the loneliness; she had only Russians and Poles about her. At times in those lonely, ghastly nights, made hideous by the moans of the beasts and the roar of the wivds, she thought of the opera-house of Paris, she thcught of the fase of Faust. Then in that emptiness and darkness of her life she began to realize that she loved Correze, began to understand all that she cost to him in pain and vain regret. If she would receive Jeanne de Sonnaz, she could go back—go back to the splendor, the color, the light of life, go back to the world where Correze reigned, where his voice was heard, where ie be would answer hers. But it never once occurred to her o yield. ow and then the truth came to her mind that Sergius Zouroff had sent her to this solitude not only asa vengeance, but asa temptation. Then all the strength in her repelled the very memory of Correze. ** Would my husband make me like Jeanne de Sonnaz,” she thought, with a shudder of disgust, “so that I may no longer have the right to scorn her?” And she strove with all her might to keep her mind calm and slear, her body in health, her sympathies awake for other sor- rows than her own. ! She studied the dead languages, which she had half forgotten, with the old priest of Szarisla, and conjured away the visions that assailed her in those endJess and horrible nights, with the sonorous cadence of the Greek poets, and in the daytime, when the frost had made the white world firm under foot, passed al- most all the hours of light sending her fiery horses through the glittering and rarefied air. So the months passed, and it was mid-winter. Letters and journals told her that the gay world went on its course, but to her it seemed as utterly alien as it could do to any worker in the depths of the salt, or quicksilver-mines that supplied his wealth to Prince Zouroff. The world had already forgotten her. §So- ciety only said, ‘‘ Princess Vera is passing the winter in Poland; | s0 eccentric; but she was always strange and a saint;” and then, with the usual little laugh, society added, **' Th~. 5 is something about Correze.” But the world does not long talk, even caiuaniously, of what is absent. Prince Zouroff was on the boulevards; he gave his usual great dinners; he played as usual at his clubs; he entered his horses as usual for great races; the world did not concern itself largely about his wife. ) She was in Poland. - She cominitted the heaviest sin against society, the’only one it never pardons. She was absent. No one had even the consc'a- tion to think that she nad her lover with her, Correze was singing in Berlin. cS cc ) cComicboo