Moths by Ouida — page 72: what you’re looking at

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

Wat 3 Ay LIVE oe > sh phe 4 fi VN » ie ‘ RRR yh . f » ads Qn tye La § Yee NY ay a eee 7. ’ , i , ‘ : ws if a a 4 , iy : b ae, ; ; ‘ ’ ' - . + a : 4 ' j . : ie 4 wee Pre TRAN , ¥ \ i i he 4 We WH J . ; Woe : : a) > ; , pale - . j ¥ ‘ f bed CS | MOTHS. that way, and could never bring herself to comprehend how prins cesses and duchesses could find any pleasure in tearing over ‘bleak fields and jumping scratching hedges. <A calorifere at eighty degrees always, a sacque from Sirandin’s, an easy-chair and a dozen young men in various stages of admiration around her—that was her idea of comfort. Everything out of doors made her chilly. She watched Vere pass away, and laughed, and yet felt sorry. She herself was the rage because she was a great beauty anda great flirt; because she had been signaled for honor by a prince whose word was law; because she was made for the age she lived in, with a vulgarity that was chic, and an audacity that was unri- valed, and a delightful mingling of utter ignorance and intense shrewdness, of slavish submission to fashion and daring eccentric-. ity in expression, that made her to the jaded palate of the world, a social eaviare, a moral absinthe. Exquisitely pretty, perfectly ‘dressed, as dainty to look at as porcelain, and as common to talk © to as a camp-follower, she like many of her nation, nad found herself,’to her own surprise, an object of adoration to that great world of which she had known nothing except from the imagina- tive columns of ‘‘own correspondents.”” But Fuschia Leach was no fool, as she said often herself, and she felt, as her eyes followed Vere, that this calm, cold child, with her great contemptuous eyes and her tranquil voice, had something she had not—some- thing that not all the art of Mr. Worth could send with his con- - fections to herself. ‘“My word! I think I'll take Muil just to rile her!” she thought to herself, and thought, too, for she was good-natured and less vain than she looked, ‘‘ perhaps she’d like me a little bit then; and then, again, perhaps she wouldn’t. ; ‘‘That girl’s worth five hundred of me, and yet they don’t see it!” she mused now, as she pursued Vere's shadow with her eyes across the lawn. She knew very well that with some combina- tion of scarlet and orange or sage and maize upon her, in some miracle of velvet and silk, with a cigarette in her mouth, a thousand little curls on her forehead, the last slang on her lips, and the last news on her ear, her own generation would find her adorable while it would leave Vere Herbert in the shade. And yet she would sooner have been Vere Herbert; yet she would | sooner have had that subtle, nameless, unattainable ‘‘some- thing” which no combination of scarlet and orange, of sage and maize, was able to give, no imitation or effort for half a lifetime would teach. ‘We don’t raise that sort, somehow, our way,” she reflected, wistfully. She let the riding-party go out with a sigh of envy—the slender figure of Vere foremost on a mare that few cared to mount—and went herself to drive in a little basket-carriage . with the Princess Nelaguine, accompanied by an escort of her Own more intimate adorers, to call attwo or three of the maison- nettes scattered along the line of the shore between Felicite and Villers. | ; , _ “Strikes me I'll have to take that duke after all,” she thought - j } a ‘ ; ’ : : » : b a% ' yi ¢ 7 \ : rey ' . : , vad / A i: d of > ae + v4 1 ah Vit “ fae ? aie F ; - ries ARS att ‘ oy te ee he + » -c€omicbooks.co