Moths by Ouida — page 5: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS CHAPTER I. Lapy DoLLy ought to have been perfectly happy. She had everything that can constitute the joys of a woman of her epoch. She was at Trouville. She had won heaps of money at play. She had madea correct book on the races. She had see aer chief rival looking bilious in‘én unbecoming gown. She had kad a letter from her husband to say he was going away to Java or Jupiter or somewhere indefinitely. She wore a costume which had cost a great tailor twenty hours of anxious and continuous’ reflection. Nothing but bapiiste, indeed; but baptiste sublimized and apotheosized by niello buttons, old lace, and genius. She had her adorers and slaves grouped about her. She had tound her dearest friend out in cheating at cards. She had dined the night before at the Maison Persanne, and would dine this night at the Maison Normande. She had been told a state secret by a minis- ter which she knew it was shameful of him to have been coaxed. and chaffed into revealing. She had had a new comedy read to her in manuscript form three months before it would be given in Paris, and had screamed at all its indecencies in the choice com- pany of a Serene Princess and two ambassadresses as they ali took their chocolate in their dressing-gowns. Above all, she wag at Trouville, having left half a million of debts behind her strewn about in all directions, and standing free as air in gossamer gar- ments on the planks in thesummer sunshine. There was a charm- ing blue sea beside her, a balmy, fluttering breeze around her, a crowd of the most fashionable sunshades in Europe before her, like a bed of full-blown anemones. She had floated and bobbed and swum and splashed, semi-nude, with all the other mermaids a la mode, and had shown that she must still bea pretty woman, pretty even in daylight, or the men would not have looked at her - 60, and yet, with all this, she was not enjoying herself. it was very hard. } The yachts came and went, the sands glittered, the music t Gcomicbooks. (@. m