Moths by Ouida — page 121: what you’re looking at

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

WOOL LL, e 11? Russian Colonel of the Guard %6 Gérreze, as their sledge flew- over the snow on the Newski Prospect. Correze gave a shudder of disgust; he said nothing. Critics in music at the opera-house that night declared then, and long after, that for the first time in all his career he was guilty of more than one artistic error as hesang in the great part , of John of Leyden. When the opera was over, and he sat at a supper, in a room filled with hot-house flowers and lovely ladies, while the breath froze on the beards of the sentinels on guard in the white, still night without, Correze heard little of the laughter, saw little of the beauty, round him. He was thinking all the while ‘The heaviest sorrow of my life will always be, not to have saved that child from her mother.” CHAPTER XiI, BETWEEN the Gulf of Villafranca and that of Eza there was a white, shining, sunlit house, with gardens that were, in the dreariest month of the year, rich and red with roses, golden with orange fruit, and made stately by palms of long growth, through whose stems the blue sea shone. To these gardens there was a long terrace of white marble stretching along the edge of the cliff, with the waves beating far down below; to the terrace there were marble seats and marble steps, and copies of the Loves and Fauns of the Vatican and of the Capitol, with the glow of geraniums flame-like about their feet. Up and down the length of this stately place a woman moved with a step that-was slow and weary, and yet very restless—the step of a thing that is chained. The woman was very young, and very pale; her skirts of olive velvet swept the white stone; her fair hair was coiled loosely with a golden arrow run through it; round her throat there were strings of pearls, the jewels of morning. All womem envied her the riches of which those pearls were the emblem. She was Vera, Princess Zouroff. Vera always, now. She moved up and down, up and down, fatiguing herself, and unconscious of fatigue; the sunny world was quiet about her; the greyhound paced beside her, keeping step with hers. She was alone, and there was no one to look upon her face and see its pain, its weariness, its disgust. Only a week ago, she thought; only a week since she had fallen in a swoon at the altar of the Russian church; only a week since she had been the girl Vere Herbert. Only a week!—and it seemed to her that thousands of years had come and gone, parting her by ages frem that old sweet season of ignorance, of Innocence, of peace, of youth. : She was only sixteen still, but she was no more young. Her girlhood had been killed in her, as a spring blossom is crushed by a rough, hot hand that, meaning to caress it, kills it. yeah A great disgust filled her, and seemed to suffocate her with its loathing and its shame. Everything else in her seemed dead, except that one bitter sense of intolerable revulsion, Al! the re ons ~ “comicboo