Moths by Ouida — page 14: what you’re looking at

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

10 Be an MOTHS. CHAPTER ILI. LADY DoROTHY VANDERDECKEN, who was Lady Doily to every- body, down to the very boys that ran after her carriage in the streets, was the seventh daughter of a very poor. peer, the Earl of Caterham, who was 4 clever politician, but always in a chronic state of financial embarrassment. Lady Dolly had made a very silly love-match with her own cousin, Vere Herbert, a younger son of her uncle, the Duke of Mull and Cantire, when she was only seventeen and he had just left Oxford and entered the Church. But Vere Herbert had only lived long enough for her to begin to get very tired of his country parsonage in the wilds of the Devonshire moors, and to be left before _ she was twenty with a miserable pittance for her portion, and a little daughter twelve months old to plague her father. Lady Dolly cried terribly for a fortnight, and thought she cried for love, when she only cried for worry. In another fortnight or so she had ceased to cry, had found out that crape brightened her pretty tea-rose skin, had discarded her baby to the care of her aunt and mother-in-law, the old and austere Duchess of Mull, and had gone for her health with her own gay little mother, the Countess of Caterham, to the south of France. In the south of France, Lady Dolly forgot that she had ever cried at all, and in a year’s time from the logs of Vere Herbert had married herself again toa Mr. Vanderdecken, an Englishman of Dutch extraction, a rich man, of no remarkable lineage, a financier, a contractor, a politician, a very restless creature, always rushing about alone, and never asking any questions—which suited her. On the other hand, it suited him to ally himself with a score of great families and obtain a lovely and high-born wife; it was one of those mar- riages which everybody calls so sensible, so suitable, so very nice! Quite unlike the marriage with poor Vere Herbert, which every- body had screamed at, as they had not made up five hundred a year in income, or forty-five years in age, between them. Lady Dolly and Vanderdecken did not perhaps find it so per- fectly well assorted when they had had a little of it; she thought him stingy, he thought her frivolous, but they did not tell anybody else so, and so everybody. always said that the mar- rlage was very nice. They were always seen in the Bois or the Park together, and always kept house together three months > every spring in London; they went to the country houses to- getber, and certainly dined out together at least a dozen times sey Season; nothing could be nicer, Lady Dolly took care of. at. | She thought him a great bore, a great screw; she never had enough money by half, and he was sometimes very ys about checks. But he was not troublesome about anything else, and was generally head over ears in some wonderful loan, or contract, | or subsidy, which entailed distant journeys and absorbed hina arabe so that, on the whole, she was content and enjoyed her- Sir. 7 This morning, however, gaz bad gone down to the shore not ¥ comicbooks.com | ”