Moths by Ouida — page 174: what you’re looking at

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

70 MOTHS. — of vice—if she lent her ear to amorous compliment that veiled dishonor, if she brought herself to the level of the world she lived in, women would love her better, and her husband honor her none the less. What would he care? | Perhaps he would not have accepted absolute dishonor; but all the temptations that led to it he let strew her path in all the various guises of the times. That night there was a great costume ball at one of the lega- tions. It had been talked of for months, and was to be the most brilliant thing of this kind that Paris had seen for many seasons, All the tailors of fashion, and all the famous painters of the day, had alike been pressed into the service of designing the most cor- rect dresses of past epochs, and many dusty chronicles and min- jatures in vellum in old chateaux in the country and old libraries in the city had been disturbed, to yield information and to de- cide disputes. The Prince and Princess Zouroff were among the latest te arrive. Hewore the dress of his ancestor in the time of Ivan II., a mass of sables and of jewels. She, by a whim of his own, was called the Ice-Spirit, and diamonds and rock crystals shone all over her from head to foot. Her entrance was the sensation of the evening; and as he heard the exclamations that awarded her the supreme place of beauty where half the loveliness of Europe had been assembled, that vanity of possession which is the basest side of passion revived in him, and made his sluggish pulses beat at once with the miser’s and the spendthrift’s pleasure. **'Yes, you are right; she is really very beautiful,” whispered Jeanne de Sonnaz in hisear. ‘‘To represent Ice it is not neces- sary to have chien.” Zouroff frowned: he was never pleased with being reminded of things that he said himself. The duchess herself had chien enough for twenty women. She called herself a Sorceress, and was all in red, a brilliant, poppy- like, flame-like, Mephistophelian red, with her famous rubies, and many another jewel, winking like wicked little eyes all over her, while a narrow Venetian mask of black hid her ugliest features and let her blazing eyes destroy their worlds. As a pageant, the great ball was gorgeous and beautiful; as a triumph, few women ever knew one greater than that night was to Vere. Yet the hours were tiresome to her. When her eyes had once rested on the pretty picture that the splended crowd composed, she would willingly have gone away. She felt what the Easterns call an asp at her heart. The barrennegs and lone- liness of her life weighed on her; and it was not in her nature to find solace in levity and consolation in homage, Others might do so and did do so; she could not. | ‘‘Madame, what can you want to be content?” said an old wit to her. ‘‘ You have rendered every man envious and every woman unhappy. Surely, that is a paradise for you, from which you can look down, smiling in scorn at our tears?” Were swnilec, but net with scorn, | (E(o) 70) G 900 SS (eo)