Lady Evelyn — page 119: what you’re looking at

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

112 [La Rose de Castile. captive by a peauty as perfect as the Venus Medici and as cold as a refrigerator. Heaven forbid she should ever cast me into that bit of bathos wherein she has flung Amethyst, Rivers, and the rest of her victims. Virginie is right—the grand passion is idiotic, and a deuce of a bore. I can play at love-making with the best, but mar- {?? riage and domestic bliss—bah! _ And then he turned from the camellia-crowned siren over the way, and flirted, as Vivian Trevannance could flirt, with his gay Parisian-Neapolitan countess—flirted so recklessly that his father scowled from -his seat, and the Earl of Clontarf shrugged his shoulders, and decided he would speak to his daughter about accepting the Duke of Amethyst as soon as he proposed. The ladies arose presently and swept away; but in spite of the gay badinage with which he and La Portici parted, it was not the fairy form of the countess he watched from the room, but the regal figure of the earl’s daughter. “She might sit by an emperor’s side and command him ) tasks, ” he thought. “What is it Othello says? Her form is as perfect as a statuette of Coysvox; her face - as pure and lovely as one of -Raphael’s Madonnas. And all that is to go to Amethyst—a fellow who, in six months, will hold her a little higher than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Faugh! it would be Vulcan wed- ded to Venus! Out of pity for her I ought to step in and prevent the sacrifice.” He glanced disdainfully across the table at the heavy face and dull eyes of his grace—eyes that only beauty and billiards, horseflesh and horse-racing, could ever lichten. "A man must marry some time,’ as the governor. re- marks. It’s the thing to do, and, by Jove! she is a mate fora king. [ll Md La Portici to the deuce and devote myself for the rest of the evening to my proud Castilian Rose.” Half an hour after, when the gentlemen entered the drawing-room, his glance sought out Lady Evelyn. She sat at the piano playing softly weird improvisations of her own that seemed strangely in harmony with the wild night-storm without. _ Heedless of Lady Clydesmore, who signaled him with ‘ . 1 =