Moths by Ouida — page 11: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. a should be breathless to flee to embrace the one to whom she owes her being——”’ snot ‘‘ Hold your tongue!” said Lady Dolly, angrily. Fraulein Schroder wore a green veil and blue spectacles, and was not beautiful to the eye, and was grizzle-headed; and the friends and lovers and courtiers and enemies were laughing uncontrollably. ‘What an angel of loveliness! But awoman; quitea woman. She must be twenty at least, my dear?” said Princess Helene, ba always said the pleasantest thing she could think of at any ime. ‘Vere is sixteen,” said Lady Dolly, sharply, much ruffled, seeing angrily that the girl’s head, in its sunburnt sailor’s hat bound with a black ribbon, was nearly a foot higher than her own, hung down, though it now was, like a rose in the rain, There was a person coming up from his mile swim in the sea, with the burnous-like folds cast about him more gracefully than other men were ever able to cast theirs. ‘‘How do you manage to get so much grace out of a dozen yards of bath toweling, Correze?” asked an Englishman who was with him. “C'est mon metier a moi detre poseur,” said the other, para- phrasing the famous saying of Joseph the Second. ‘‘ Ah, no,” said the Englishman, ‘* you never do poser; that is the secret of the charm of the thing. I feel like a fool in these spadilles and swathings; but you—you look as if you had just come up from a sacred river of the East, and are worthy to sing strophes to a Nourmahal.” ““Hncore une fois—mon metier,” said the other, casting some of the linen folds over his head, which was exceedingly handsome, and almost line for line like the young Sebastian. At that moment he saw the little scene going on between Lady Dolly and her daughter, and watched it from a distance with much amusemement. ** What an exquisite face that child has!—that lovely tint like the wild white rose, there is nothing like it. It makes all the women with color look vulgar,” he said, after a prolonged gaze through a friend’s field glass. ‘*‘ Who is she, do you say? Miladi Dolly’s daughter? Is it possible? I thought Miladi was made herself yesterday in Giroux’s shop, and was kept in a wadded box when her mechanism was not wound up. Surely it is impossible Dolly can ever have stooped to such a homely unartificial thing as maternity. You must be mistaken.” ‘*“No. In remote ages she married a cousin. The white wild rose is the result.” ‘*A charming result. A child only, but an exquisite child. It is a pity we are in this costume, or we would go and be presented; though Miladi would not be grateful, to judge by her face now. Poor little Dolly? It is hard to have adaughter—and a daughter that comes to Trouville in August.” Then he who was a figure of grace even in white toweling. and had a face like Del Sarto’s Sebastian, handed the field-glass back to his friend, and went to his hotel to dress. Meanwhile Lady Dolly was saying, irritably, ‘‘Go home to my co.