Moths by Ouida — page 355: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS, 81 instinct than was common witi him had begun once more te move him ioward that mute captive of his willat Szarisla. But Jeanne de Sonnaz had always been careful to smother those im- pulses at their birth under ridicule, and to arouse in their stead anger, impatience, and the morbidness of a vague jealousy. Without the influence of Jeanne de Sonnaz, Zouroff would have loved his wife; not nobly, because he was not noble, nor faithfully, because he could not be otherwise than inconstant, but still with more honesty of affection, more indulgence, and more purity, than’he had ever had excited in him by any other creature. But perpetually, as that better impulse rose, she had been at hand to extinguish it by irony, by mockery, or by suggestion. He left her house, now, in bitter rage, which in justice:should have fallen on her, but which by habit fell instead upon his absent wife. Why could not Vere have been likeany other of the many high-born maidens of whom he could have made a Princess Zouroff, and been indifferent, and malleable, and wisely blind, and willing to kiss Jeanne de Sonnaz on the cheek, as great ladies salute one another all over the world, no matter what feuds may divide or rivalries may sting them? Why must she be a woman unfitted for her century, made only for those old legendary and saintly days when the bread had changed to roses in Saint Eliza- beth’s hands? A devilish wish, that he was ashamed of even as it rose up in him, came over him, without his being able to drive it away. He wished he could find his wife guilty. He knew her as innocent as children unborn: yet he wished he could find her weak and tempted like the rest. His course would then be easy. Throughout the adulation of the world she had remained un- - tempted, and she remained so still, in that solitude, that dullness, that captivity which would have driven any other to summon a lover to her side before a month of that joyless existence had flown. But thenshe had no lover. He was certain she had none. Not all the mockery and insistence of his mistress could make him seriously credit any infidelity, even of thought or sen- timent, in Vere. ‘* And had she one, I would strangle him to- morrow,” he thought, with that vanity of possession which se sadly and cruelly survives the death of passion, the extinction of all love. Justify your separation from her, said his friend; but how? Sergius Zouroff was not yet low enough to accuse falsely a woman he believed from his soul to be innocent. He was per- plexed, and was bitterly angered against her, against himself, against all the world. He had meant to break her spirit and her will by her exile; he had never dreamed that sne would bear itin pa- tience and in silence; knowing women well, he had fully expected that the strength of her opposition would soor wear itself out, that she would soon see that to meet Jeanne de Sonnaz in society, and . exchange the commonplaces of courtesy and custom was prefer- able to a life in the snows of the North, with no one to admire her loveliness, no pleasure to beguile her days and nights; he had thought that one single week of the winter weather with its jonely evenings in that deserted place would banish ali power of CS GEomicboo (ef @)