Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 251: what you’re looking at

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

HER ROYAL LOVER. 243 if appraised by weight, believed herself an excep- tionable wit. Forgetting that among the blind the one-eyed are kings, she was very proud of the opinion that the unsophisticated inhabitants of a little pro- vincial town possessed of her, where, in her narrow circle she was held like a sovereign. This viper of colossal dimensions was the terror of all her sur- roundings; before her each one yielded, so great was the terror inspired by the venom distilled by her infectious slaver. Poor Stanislas, knowing that any wrestling was impossible with this shrew of base origin, submitted to his yoke with a resigna- tion worthy of a better cause. A little old man was conversing with her. It was the minister of foreign affairs. With impaired ex- terior, having neither teeth nor hair, but still pre- serving intact within him that subtle brain which | understood so well how to embroil politics, and make | his government fish in troubled waters ending the | difficulties which he had excited elsewhere. He changed his opinion like his shirt. Generally lean- ing toward the right, nevertheless, he had permitted himself during a momentary weakness to become innoculated with republican vaccine. “A Conserva- tive bitten by a Radical, what?” as a witty writer has said. Farther on, young Sergius of Pattenpouff was to be seen, having drank at a great draught the little disencumbered money that his parents were able to give him, up to his neck in debt, and afflicted in the bargain with chronic bronchitis. Notwithstanding that, his hope of the future was firm, forit was based upon an intrigue, in an embryo state as yet in his mother’s brain, an intrigue tending to put | one day in his clumsy lieutenant’s claw of the hus- Eomicbooks.com