Moths by Ouida — page 51: what you’re looking at

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

a ss Sebo —— ' MOTHS. ACURA iyi Correze did not esteem women highly. They had caressed: him into satiety, and wooed him till his gratitude was more than half contempt; but in his innermost heart, where his old faiths dwelt unseen by even his best friends, there was the fancy of what a woman should be, might be, unspotted by the world, and innocent in thought as well as deed. Such a woman had seemed to him to be in the girl whom he had found by the sea, as the grand glory of the full white rose lies folded in the blush-rose bud. ft was too absurd! Her mother had been right, quite right. The little, frivolous, artificial woman, with her perruque and her papelitos, had said all that society would say. Ske had been wise, and he, in a passing moment of sentiment, a fool. He had scarcely really considered the full meaning of his own words, pa where they would have led him had they been taken seri- ously. He thought now of all the letters lying in those cabinets and caskets at Paris. ‘‘ What a burnt-sacrifice of note-paper I should have had to make!” he said to himself, and smoked a little, and tried to ridi- cule himself. Was he, Correze, the lover of great rulers of society, the hero of a hundred and a thousand intrigues and romances, in love » with a mere child, because she had serious eyes and no shoes and stockings? bewitched by a young girl who had sat half an hour beside him by a sweet-brier hedge on a cliff by the sea? It was too absurd. 3 From Baden there had come an impatient summons from @ dark-haired duchess of the Second Empire, who fancied that she reigned over his life because he reigned over hers like a fatality, an imperious and proud woman whom the lamps in the Avenue de ’Empereur had shone on as she stole on foot, muffled and veiled, to hide her burning face on his breast; he thought of her where she was waiting for him, and a little shudder of disgust went over him. ) He threw open the window of his bed-carriage, and leaned his head out, to meet the midnight wind. The train was passing a little village, afew cottages, a pond, a mill, a group of willows silvery in the starlight. From the little green gardens there} came a scent of sweet-brier and hedge roses. ‘‘Shall I smell that smell all my life?” he thought, impa- tientky. CHAPTER VII. LaDy DOLLY had a very dear friend. Of course she had five hundred dear friends, but this one she was really fond of; that is to say, she never said anything bad of her, and only laughed at her good-naturedly when she had left arcom; and this abstinence is as strorg a mark of sinceritv nowadays, as dying for anothar comicboo <5 = Vs . > +> >