Moths by Ouida — page 122: what you’re looking at

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

318 MOTHS. volted pride in her was like a living thing buried under a weight of sand, and speechless, but aghast and burning. ‘‘ How could she—how could she?” she thought, every hour of the day; and the crime of her mother against her seemed the vilest the earth could hold. | She herself had not known what she had done when she had consented to give herself in marriage, but her mother had known. She did not reason now. She only felt. : An unutterable depression and repugnance weighed on her always; she felt ashamed of the sun when it rose, of her own eyes when they looked at her from the mirror. To herself she seerned fallen so low, sunk to such deep degradation, that the basest of creatures would have had full right to strike her cheek, and spit in her face, and call her sister. Poets in all time have poured out their pity on the woman who wakes to a loveless dishonor; what can the few words of a priest, or the envy of a world, do to lighten that shame to sacrificed innocence!—Nothing. Her life had changed as suddenly as a flower changes when the hot sirocco blows over it and fills it with sand instead of dew. Nothing could help her. Nothing could undo what had been done. Nothing could make her ever more the clear-eyed, 1 akacnat child that had not even known the meaning of any bhame. ‘*God himself could not help me!” she thought, with a bitter- ness of resignation that was more hopeless than that of the mar- tyrs of old; and she paced up and down the marble road of the terrace, wondering how long her life would last like this. All the magnificence that surrounded her was hateful; all the gifts that were heaped upon her were like insult; all the congrat- ulations that were poured out on her were like the mockeries of apes, like the crackling of dead leaves. In her own sight, and without sin of her own, she had becoine vile. And it was only a week ago! Society would have laughed. Society had set its seal of approval upon this union, and upon all such unions, and so deemed them sanctified. Year after year, one on another, the pretty, rosy, goiden-curled daughters of fair mothers were carefully tended and cultured and reared up to grace the proud races from which they sprung, and were brought out into the great world with their first bloom on them like half- opened roses, with no other end or aim set before them as the one ambition of their lives than to make such a marriage as this. hosoever achieved such was blessed. Pollution? prostitution? Society would have closed its ears to such words, knowing nothing of such things, not choosing to know anything. Shame? What shame could there be when he was her husband? | Paani’ fanciful exaggeration!—society would have stared and smiled. The grim old woman who studied her Bible on the iron-bound Northumbrian shores—the frivolous, dreamy, fantastic singer, co comicbooks