Moths by Ouida — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

‘MOTHS. : 9 ‘‘1 was furious! Who wouldn’t have been? That vile dress! La qtr ae old woman! And kissing me too—me—on the ach!” : Her companion smiled grimly. **She couldn’t tell that one musn’t touch you when you're ‘doneup.’ You didn’t do up so much three years ago. She'll soon learn, never fear.” | | ‘You grow quite horribly rude, Jack.” He smoked serenely. ‘¢ And quite too odiously coarse.” He continued to smoke. She often abused him, but she never could do without him; — and he was aware of that. **And what a hight she is! and what her gowns will cost! and she must come vut soon—and that horrid Helene!” sobbed Lady Dolly, fairly bursting into tears. She had been so gay and com- fortable at Trouville, and now it was all over. What comfort could there be with a girl nearly six feet high, that looked twenty years old when she was sixteen, and who called her ‘‘ mother?” *‘Don’t make a fuss,” said the counsellor from the stove. *‘She’s very handsome, awfully pretty; you'll marry her in no time, and be just as larky as you were before. Don’t cry, there’s a dear little soul. Look here, the cutlets are getting cold, and there’s all these mullets steaming away for nothing. Come and eat, and the thing won’t seem so terrible.” Being versed in the ways of consolations, he opened a bottle of Moselle with an inviting rush of sound, and let the golden stream foam itself softly over a lump of ice in a glass. Lady Dolly looked up, dried her eyes, and sat down at the table. ‘‘Vere must be hungry, surely,” she said, with a sudden re- membrance, twenty minutes later, eating her last morsel of a truffled timbale. The counsellor smiled grimly. ‘‘Tt’s rather late to think about that. I sent her her breakfast before you came.” | ‘* Dear me! how very fatherly of you The counsellor laughed. ‘‘I feel like her father, Iassure you.” Lady Dolly colored, and lit acigarette. She felt thatshe would not digest ber breakfast. Henceforth there would be two bills to pay—the interest of them, at any rate—at all the great tailors’ and milliners’ houses in Paris and London; she had an uneasy sense that to whirl in and out the mazes of the cotillons, or smoke your cigarette on the smooth lawns of shooting-clubs, vis- a-vis with your own daughter, was a position, in the main, rather ridiculous; and she had still an uneasier conviction that the girl in the brown holland would not be taught in a moment to com- prehend the necessity for the existence of Jack,—and the rest. ‘¢That horrid old duchess!” she murmured, sinking to sleep with the last atom of her cigarette crumbling itself away on the open page of a French novel. For it was the duchess who had sent her Vere, #9? ri ri 4 ’ com (C 00 (SF €(0)