Moths by Ouida — page 386: what you’re looking at

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

a MOTHS avenue and down the Champs Elysees; with her is her old com rade, Count Schondorff, who says to her— : ‘“And you alone know your brother’s divorced wife! Oh, surely, Nadine——” ‘¢‘T know the wife of Correze; I know a very noble woman who~ was the victim of my own brother and of Jeanne,” answers the little Russian lady, with asperity and resolve. ‘‘ My dear Fritz, she had no sin against my brother, no fault in her anywhere; I have told the Emperor the same thing; and I am not a coward, © though I shall salute Jeanne on both cheeks to-morrow, because life is along hypocrisy. Yes, I know Vera. I shall always love her, and honor her too. So does the Duchess of Mull. She was the martyr of a false civilization, of a society as corrupt as that of the Borgias, and far more dishonest. She had chastity, and she had also courage. We, who are all poitroons, and most of us adulteresses, when we find 2 womanlike that, gibbet her, pour encourager les autres.” At the same hour Lady Dolly, too, rolls home from Hyde Park, and ascends to her little fan-lined boudoir, and cries a little prettily with her old friend Adine, decause she has just learned that Jura, poor dear Jura, has been killed in the gun-room at agree by the explosion of a rifle he had taken down as un- oaded. ‘““Hiverything is so dreadful!” she. says, with a little sob and a shiver. ‘*‘ Only to think that I cannot know my own daughter! . And then to have to wear one’s hair flat, and the bonnets are nos becoming, say what they like, and the season is so stupid; and now poor dear Jack has killed himself, really killed himself—be- ~ cause nobody believes about that rifle being an accident, he has been so morose and so strange for years—and his mother comes and reproaches me, when it is all centuries ago, centuries! and I am sure I never did him anything but good!” Other ladies come in, all great ladies, and some men, ali youn | men, and they have tea out of little yellow cups, and sip iced syrups, and sit and talk of the death at Camelot, as they chatter between the four walls, with the celebrated fans hung all over them, amidst them the fan of Maria Theresa once sent to Felicite. ‘‘She has so much to bear, and she is such a dear little woman!” say all the friends of Lady Dolly. ‘‘ And itis very dreadful for her not to be able to know her own daughter. She always be- haves beautifully about it, she is so kind, so sweet. But how can she know her, you know? divorced and living out of the world with Correze!” _ So the moths eat the ermine; and the world kisses the leper en both cheeks, : (THE END. | icomicbooks.co