Moths by Ouida — page 68: what you’re looking at

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

ve | Ws MOTHS. *T do not like to waltz. I never do.” 4 ‘‘No, love? ‘Well, temperaments differ. But surely you wouldn’t be so cruel as to condemn your mother only to have your inclinations, would you? Dolly was always full of fun. f think you have not fun enough in you, perhaps.” : ‘©But my father is dead.” ‘‘My dear, Queen Anne is dead! Henri Quatre est sur le Pont- Neuf. What other news will you tell us? I am not saying, dear, that you should thin less of your father’s memory. It is too sweet of you to feel so much, and very, very rare, alas! for now- adays our children are so forgetful, and we are so little to them, But still, you know, your mamma is young, and so pretty as she is, too, no one can expect her to shut herself up arecluse. Pers haps, had you been always with her, things would have been different; but she has always been so much admired and so pet- ted by every one that it was only natural—only natural that——” ‘¢She should not want me,” said Vere, as Lady Stoat paused for a word that should adequately express Lady Dolly’s excuses whilst preserving Lady Dolly’s dignity before her daughter. _. “Oh, my dear, I never meant that,” she said, hastily, whilst . thinking, ‘‘ Quel enfant terribie!” The brilliant Fuschia was inclined to be very amiable and cor- dial to the young daughter of Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken, but Vere repelled her overtures with a chilling courtesy that made the bright American ‘‘ feel foolish.” | But Pick-me-up, as she was usually called in the great world, was not a person to be deterred by one slight, or by fifty. To never risk a rebuff is a golden rule for self-respect; but it is not the rule by which new people achieve success. Fuschia Leach was delighted with her social success, but she never deceived herself about it. | In America, her people were “‘new people,”—that is to say, her father had made his pile selling cigars and drugs in a wild country, and her brothers were making — bigger pile killing pigs, on a gigantic scale, out west. In New York, she and hers were deemed ‘‘shoddy,”—the verv shoddiest of shoddy—and were looked coldly on, and were left unvisited. But, boldly springing over to less sensitive Europe, they found themselves without effort received at courts and in embassies, and had become fash- ionable people almost as soon as they had had time to buy high- stepping horses and ask great tailor: to clothe them. It seemed very funny; it seemed quite unaccountable, and it bewildered them a little; but Fuschia Leach did not lose her head. ‘‘Isurmise I’d best eat the curds while they’re sweet,” she * said to herself, and she did eat them. She dressed, she danced, she made all her young men fetch and carry for her, she flirted, she caught up the ways and words and habits and graces of the © great world, and adapted herself to her new sphere with versatile cleverness, but all the same she ‘‘ prospected” with a keen eye © all the land that lay around her, and never deceived herself. ‘*T look cunning, and I’m spry, and I cheek him, and say outs rageous things, and he likes it, and so they all go mad on me _ after him,” she said to herself; meaning by her pronoun the great oe ) ; } : : . ; “ ’ . - 4 /; “4 : vi : MP’ Mang 58 p 4 3 : ring ; < 4 ; Vis" a} : : : te 2 Ae : ' comicbooks.co : rs 4 Pate f . ve Pgh / - p 4 4 “i - ‘ os a 43 - a a ‘a , wh 2 4 * , ’ 5 ‘ y 4 , 5 \ Fe eva a prs, 1 “ er VS RA we 2G a ae hed oe Ped *% be d Fiioin, Mou “ ‘ames var ar a! / VAS BA, a he Vie thet As as = "-