Moths by Ouida — page 74: what you’re looking at

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

7 : MOTHS tated by her failure as a companionable creature. She was triumphant to see the impression made by the girl’s blending of sculptural calm and childlike loveliness; she was infuriated a hundred times a day by Vere’s obduracy, coldness, and unwise directness of speech. : : “Tt is almost imbecility,” thought Lady Dolly, obliged to apologize continually for some misplaced sincerity or obtuse neg- ligence with which her daughter had offended people. “You should never froisser other people; never, never!” said . Lady Dolly. ‘‘If Nero, and-what-was-her-name that began with an M, were to come in your world, you should be civil to them; you should be charming to them so long as they were people that were received. Nobody is to judge for’ themselves—never. If society is with you, then you are all right. Besides, it looks so niuch prettier to be nice and charitable and all that; and, besides, what do you know, vou chit?” Vere was always silent under these instructions; they were but little understood by her. When she did /froisser people it was generally because their consciences gave a sting to her sim- ple frank words of which the young speaker herself was quite unconscious. s ‘‘Am Ia Puritan?” Vere thought, with anxious self-examina- tion. In history she detested the Puritans: all her sympathies ' were with the other side. Yet she began now to think that, if the Stuart court ever resenibled Felicite, the Puritans had not perhaps been so very far wrong. | Felicite was nothing more or worse than a very fashionable house of the period; but it was the world in little, and it hurt her, bewildered her, and in many ways disgusted her. If she had been stupid, as her mother thought her, she would have been amused or indifferent; but she was not stupid, and she was. oppressed and saddened. At Bulmer she had been reared to think truth the first law of life, modesty as natural to a gentlewoman as cleanliness, delicacy and reserve the attributes of all good breeding, and sincerity indispensable to self- dep At Felicite, who seemed to care for any one of these ings? ~ Lady Stoat gave them lip-service; indeed, but with that excep- tion, no one took the trouble even to render them that question- able homage which hypocrisy pays to virtue. : In a world that was the really great world, so far as fashion went and rank (for the house-party at Felicite was composed of people of the purest blood and highest station, people very exclu- sive, very prominent, and very illustrious), Vere found things that seemed passing strange to her. When she heard of profes- sional beauties, whose portraits were sold for a shilling, and — whose hames were as cheap as red herrings, yet who were re- ceived at court and envied by princesses; when she ’saw that men were the wooed, not the wooers, and that the art of flirtation was reduced to a tournament of effrontery; when she saw a great duchess go out with the guns, carrying her own chokebore by Purdy and showing her slender limbs in gaiters; when she saw wurried women not much older than herself spending hour after ? com G 900 <Sa(e(e)