Moths by Ouida — page 315: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. eas peach and then complain that it does not retain its bloom. Yet that is what you and all men do do. It is utterly absurd, Some one will do it with my Berthe and my Claire, and I shall hate the some one; for I love my little girls. Yes, I dot While you know very well that she is——” | *“‘ You preach very eloquently!” said Zouroff, with his face’ | flushed and his thick eyebrows drawn together. _ “TI preach what I know,” said his friend,—‘‘ what I have ob- \served, as I say, a thousand times ten thousand times; men teach ‘lubricity and expect chastity. It is really too ridiculous. But it (‘is what we call the holiness of marriage. Now, will you please to go away? Paul has a ‘fusion’ breakfast of all the parties, and I want to dress.” ‘¢ But——” ““Go away!” said Madame Jeanne, imperiously, with a little stamp of her slipper. | Zouroff, who even to his own autocratic master was seldom obedient, took his leave, and went. She had made his blood hot with rage, his head dull with suspicion. He threw himself into his carriage and drove through the streets of Paris in moody re- fiection. Uttered by a virtuous woman, the words he had heard would have made no more impression than any court sermon that he had to sit throughout and hear in an Imperial chapel; but spoken by Jeanne de Sonnaz they smote him hardly. A better emotion than was usual with her had moved her in speaking them, a sense of justice toward the absent woman whom she had yet all the will in the world to destroy; and the bitterness of them must have been an unwilling witness from: a femme galante to which he could not attach either favoritism or prejudice, and so weighed on him and smote him heavily. A rebuke even from Saint John of the Golden Mouth would have left him callous and scoffing; but a condemnation from the lips of oneof the companions of his sins and follies- one of the worldliest of this world—made him wince under its justice, and he knew that his sins against his wife were heavier and grosser than even Jeanne de Sonnaz knew or guessed. The sullen remorse that had brooded in him ever since the day on the terrace at Villafranca deepened and darkened over him. There was cruel and coarse blood in his veins, the blood of a race that through long centuries had passed their lives in pas- sion, in tyranny, and in deeds of violence, denying no impulse, fearing no future. But there was manliness in him also, though weakened, depraved, and obscured; and this manliness made him feel a coward beside Vere. A curious jealousy took possession of him, which was half hatred and half remorse. He felt like one of those princes who own a classic and world-renowned statue, and shut itina cab- inet, and never care to look at it, yet who being menaced with its loss suddenly rise to fury and feel beggared; not because the classic marble was any joy or marvel to themselves, but because the world had envied it to them vainly and it bad made their treasure house the desired of others. He suddenly realized that the loss of his wife would, like thatof the statue, make him poor ; \ comicbooks feo}