A Struggle for a Ring — page 188: what you’re looking at

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

| 184 AT SCHOOL. CHAPTER XXVI. AT SCHOOL. Alice Derwent found that she had done a wise thing for herself in leaving home. There she would simply have made herself miserable and wretched—have wasted her time and thoughts in lamenting her love, the absence of her husband, his cruel indifference. She would have lost her beauty by fretting and fuming, in melancholy thoughts and futile desires. - Here life had a thousand ends and aims; the world was quite a different place; life wore an- other aspect. For the first time she saw the fashionable aspect of life—its gayeties, pleasures, amusements were all discussed in her preserce. She learned to talk as others talked; the drawing-room, the balls, all became familiar to her as household words. She improved rapidly, won- derfully. She had been well and solidly grounded in all the elements of education ; now to this was added a super- structure of accomplishments. _ Alice rapidly acquired a grace of saree that was in itself almost perfect. Madame Roubart took great interest in her new pupil; they had together many of those /e/e-a-defes with which madame only favored her most aristocratic pupils. Madame was deeply interested in that most fair face; the sad, sweet eyes had a language all their own for her. She was curious, too; she longed to know more of this fair, gentle girl, whose life seemed apart from others, over whom a strange shadow hovered always, who seemed to have sprung from a lowly lot and aspired to a higher one, ” a ’ ~ * 4 Ss ™ ~ i (E(0) mn (C 000 Ss