Moths by Ouida — page 8: what you’re looking at

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

4 i MOTHS. ‘¢You seem to have been reading medical treatises, and they haven’t agreed with you. Go and buy mea ‘ Petit Journal.’” The counsellor went grumbling and obedient—a tall, good- looking, well-built, and very fair Englishman, who had shot everything that was shootable all over the known world. Lady Dolly smiled serenely on the person who glided to her elbow and took the vacant place—a slender, pale, and graceful Frencliman, the Duc de Dinant of the viedlle roche. ‘Dear old Jack gets rather a proser,” she thought, and she began to plan a fishing picnic with her little duke—a picnic at which everybody was to go barefooted, and dress like peasants -—real common peasants, you know, of course—and dredge, didn’t they call it, and poke about, and hunt for oysters. Lady Dolly had lovely feet, and could afford to uncover them; very few of her rivals could do so, a fact of which she took cruel ad- vantage, and from which she derived exquisite satisfaction in clear shallows and rock pools. ‘‘The donkeys! they’ve cramped themselves in tight boots!” she said to herself, with the scorn of a superior mind. She always gave her miniature feetand arched insteps their natural play, and therein displayed a wisdom of which, it must be honestly confessed, the rest of her career gave no glimpse. The counsellor bought the Petit Journal and a Figaro for him- self, and came back; but she did not notice him at ail. A few years before, the neglect would have made him miserable; now it made him comfortable: such is the ingratitude of man. He sat down and read the Figaro with complacency, while she, under her sunshade, beamed on Gaston de Dinant, and on four or five others of his kind; youngsters without youth, but asa compensation for the loss, with a perfect knowledge of Judic’s last song and Dumas’ last piece, of the last new card-room scan- dal and the last drawing-room adultery; of everything that was coming out at the theaters, and of all that was of promise in the stables. They were not in the least amusing in themselves, but the chatter of the world has almost always an element of the amusing in it, because it ruins so many characters, and gossips and chuckles so merrily and so hghtly over infamy, incest, or anything else that it thinks only fun, and deals with such impu- dent personalities. At any rate, they amused Lady Dolly, and her Duc de Dinant did more; t)iey arranged the picnic—without shoes, that was indispensable, without shoes, and in real peas- ant’s things, else there would be no joke; they settled their pic- nic, divorced half a dozen of their friends, conjectured about another half-dozen all those enormities which modern society would blush at in the Bible, but, out of it, whispers and chuckles over very happily; speculated about the few unhappy unknowns who had dared to enter the magic precincts of these very dusty sands; wondered with whom the Prince of Wales would dine that night, and whose that new yawl was, that had been stand- ing off since morning flying the R. Y. S. flag; and generally di- verted one another so well that, beyond an occasional passing _ Spasm of remembrance, Lady Dolly had forgotten her impending GEomicbooks (E(0)