Moths by Ouida — page 353: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. cea ‘*Must not? Who knows that word? not I,” said his friend, *T shall take the box away. It will amuse me while they put on my hair. Novels are dull. I will send you this thing back to- morrow.” “You cannot be serious!” stammered Zouroff, as he tried to wrest the box from her. ‘‘] was never more serious,” said his visitor, coolly. ‘*‘ Do not scream, do not swear. You know I do what I like. I want especially to see how my friends write to my friend. It is your own fault. Ithought men always burnt letters. I wonder if Paul has a box like this. Adieu!” She went away, with the coffer in her carriage, to fetch her husband on the Boulevard des Capucines, and Zouroff dared not interfere with her; and the casket of letters went home to the faubourg with her. In the morning she said to him, ‘‘ They were really too com- romising, those letters. You had no business to keep them. I tive burned them all, and Claire has got the coffer for her doll’s trousseau. J never thought much of my sex atany time; I think nothing now. And, really, they should no more be trusted with ink than children with firearms. Pooh! why are you so furious? They were all old letters, from balf a hundred different people; you have nothing to do with any of the writers of them now; and of course I am as secret as the grave, as discreet as a saint- ere.” 4 With any other woman he would have let loose a torrent of abuse; with her he was sulien but apparently pacified. After all, they were old letters, and he could not very clearly remember whose letters had been shut away in that old tortoise- shell casket. ‘‘T thought men always burnt these things,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz. ‘‘ But, indeed, if women are foolish enough to write them, they deserve to be unfortunate enough to have them. kept. Inever wrote to any man, except to Paul himself—and Worth.” ‘¢You are a model of virtue,” said her companion, grimly. “ T am something better,” said his friend. ‘‘ I am a woman of sense. Apropos, how long will this retreat in Poland last? It sxonot goon; it becomes absurd. The world is already talking. fhe place of the Princess Zouroff is in the Hotel Zouroff.”. | ‘«1¢ cannot be her place,” said Zouroff, savagely. ‘‘Sheis—sbe is—obdurate still. I suppose she is content; the frost has broken, the weather is good even there.” Jeanne de Sonnaz looked him m the eyes. ‘‘ Weather is not all that a woman of twenty requires for her felicity. The whole affair is absurd; I shall not permit it to go on. Isay again what I said last year at Arcachon. It may end in compromising me, and that I will not have. You must take our wife back to your house here, and live with her later at elicite, or you must prove to society that you are justified in separating from her; one or the other. As it is, youare ridiculous, apd I—I am suspected. Jaut en finir.” | Zouroff turned away and walked gloomily to and fro tne . (E(@) m Comicbooks