Moths by Ouida — page 156: what you’re looking at

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

152 | MOTHS. ening, flashing eyes. ‘‘Not one in all the centuries that we have been on the Northumberland seaboard, for we were there in the days of Otterbourne and Flodden. No man of them would ever do it. Oh, if you had ever seen that forest! and soon now it will be a blackened, smoking, reeking, treelees waste. Itisshameful of my cousin Francis.” ‘*He is in love still, and does what she tells him. My dear, - - our sex is divided into two sorts of women—those who always get their own way, and those who never get if. Pick-me-up, as: they call your cousin’s wife in London, is of the fortunate first sort. She is vulgar, ignorant, audacious, uneducated, but she takes, and in her way she is maitresse femme. You have a thousand times more mind, and ten thousand times more charac- ter, yet you do not get your own way; you never will get it.” ‘*1] would have lived on beechmast and acorns from the forest trees sooner than have sunk a shaft under one of them,” said Vere, unheeding, only thinking of the grand old glades, the deep, still greenery, the mossy haunts of buck and doe, the up- Jands and the yellow gorse, that were to be delivered over now to the smoke-fiend. , ‘That I quite believe,” said her sister-in-law. ‘‘ But itis just that-kind of sentiment in you which will forever prevent your having influence. You are too lofty; you do not stoop and see the threads in the dust that guide men.” . .** For thirteen centuries the forest has been untouched,” @nswered Vere. It was an outrage that she could vot forgive. | When she first met the Duchess of Mull after her marriage, Fuschia Leach, translated into Her Grace, said across a drawing- room, ‘‘ Vera, | am going to dig for that coal. I guess we’ll live to make a pile that way.” Vere deigned to give no answer, un- less a quick, angry flush, and the instant turning of her back on the new duchess, could be called one. The young duke sat between them, awed, awkward, and ashamed. ‘‘T will never forgive it,” his cousin said tohimlater. ‘Iwill — never forgive it. She knows no better because she was born so; but you!” He muttered a commonplace about waste of mineral wealth, and felt a poor creature. ‘‘T think you're quite right to dig,” said Lady Dolly in his ear, to console him,—‘‘ quite right to dig; why not? I dare say your wife will make your fortune, and I am sure she ought if she can, to compensate for her papa, who helps people to ‘ liquor up,’ and her brothers, who are in the pig-killing trade, pig-killing by machinery; I’ve seen a picture of it in the papers; the pigs go down a gangway, as we do on to the Channel steamers, and they come up hams and sausages. ‘Won't you have the pig-killers over? They would be quite dans le metier at Hurlingham. Of course she tells you to dig, and you do it. Good husbands always do what they’re told.” For Lady Dolly detested all the Herberts, and had no mercy whatever on any one of them; and, in her way, she was a haughty tittle woman, and, though she was shrewd enough to see that ia ~~ ,7} 4: : ‘ Ae | ie 7 y ad sf ‘ Ps p erpy tea F Y* my ‘Fi : J. < rs a’ , ei tx att 4 : ral P 5 ¥ ‘comicbooks.cc m* ben LAY