Moths by Ouida — page 187: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. 183 to her a wanton. Marriage might be loveless, and joyless, and soulless, and outrage all that it brought; but its bond had been a tik and its obligations accepted; no sin of others could set her ee. ; Her husband could not have understood that, nor could her mother, nor could her world; but to Vere it was clear as the day, that, not to.be utterly worthless in her own sight, not to be base as the sold creatures of the streets, she must give fidelity to the faithless, cleanliness to the unclean. Even that caress she had given to the roses seemed to her treacherous and wrong. aaa CHAPTER XVIII. PRINCE ZOUROFF stayed in Paris until the end of June. There was no place that he liked so well. Lady Dolly passed a few weeks at Meurice’s, and told her daughter, with a little malice and a little pleasure, that the son to whom the Duchess of Mull had recently given birth, to the joy of all the Northumbrian bor- der, had been baptized with the name of Vere, with much pomp, at Castle Herbert. ‘*My name and my father’s!” said Vere, with coldest indigna- tion. ‘‘And her father sold drink and opium to miners!” ‘* And the brothers kill pigs—by machinery,” said her mother, ‘Certainly it is very funny. ‘ If Columbus had never discovered. America, would all these queer things have happened to us? There is no doubt we do get ‘mixed,’ as the lovely Fuschia would say.” Pick-me-up, as Duchess of Mull, had become even a greater success, were that possible, than Fuschia Leach had been. No fancy frisk, no little dinner, no big ball,was anything without that brilliantly tinted face of hers, with the little impertinent nose, and the big, radiant,audacious eyes that had the glance of the street- Arab and the surprise of the fawn, Francis of Mull, tender, stupid, and shy, lived in a perpetual intoxication at the wonder of his own possession of so much beauty, so much mirth, and so much audacity, and no more dreamed of opposing her wishes than, excellent young man that he was, he had ever dreamed of opposing his tutors and guardians. He was under her charm in a blind, dazed, benighted way that diverted her and yet made her heartily sick of him; and she took the reins of government into her own hands and kept them. Nota tree was felled, not a horse was bought, not a farm-lease was signed, but what the young duchess knew the reason why. ‘“‘V’ll stop all this beastly waste, and yet I’ll do it much finer, and get a lot more for my money,” she said to herself when she first went to the biggest house of all their houses, and she did so with that admirable combination of thrift and display of which the American mind alore has the secret. Whe The expenses of his household in six months had been dimin- ished by seven thousand pounds, yet the Duke of Muil had en- fertained royalty for three days at Castle Herbert with asplend aad aD