Thrice Lost, Thrice Won — page 223: what you’re looking at

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

att 218 uae gre "Ten Years, ey - His broad brow, swarthy as a Paynim’s, ye i oJ percep tibly as he read the name of the opera, and he f lung he harmless strip of paper down, and turned his pngody. eye upon the -audience. | i pe tie! _ ‘lwo young men, sitting near, attracted hae pe aie looked—looked again—then lis tened involuntarily a o their conversation. e Ng The young men were Mr. ‘Georze Waldean: een” a ee be eyed, elegant young Frenchman, a Washington itseisaad M ~’Victor de Launey. “Ts your Parisian princess here to-night ?”. ‘Mr. W: acoa 3 i was asking, leveling his lorgnette at a particular box. “No, I see not; and the opera-house is a waste and howling wilder- — ness to half the men present. Will she show, I wonder ! OP oe c “Without doubt. She is too. impassioned a devotee. of music to miss hearing M on his first evening. — | et the must learn patience. Ah, haw it is peorless, how it is vradi- 4 ant, the lovely Estelle!” As a “Stricken ?” Mr. Waldron. said, oti 6 Laskey as 1 uae 3 of But, gare a vous! she’s dangerous. Mademoiselle De Mont- i. : rewil and the goddess Minerva are the only two ladies of my 2 acquaintance born without that uncomfortable appendage— a heart. It is the Princess Frostina, snow-white, beautiful, and snow-cold. To my certain knowledge, she has refused three of the most eligible partis a the Season, during her five weeks’ campaign.” A “And to my certain knowledge, an peer cae ee a Ve Russian prince, before she left Paris,” De Launey gaid, © stroking his mustache. “Tt is marble, mon ami—it 1s flint | of the hardest—Kstelle the Peerless. » , They talk— sthose others—of a disappointment in early life as the cause.” ye “Ah; bah!” George Waldron said, cynically. “Who Fibers bers, in these days, one’s first love—least of all, a woman. t. Look at Mademoiselle’s cousin, Madame Leonie Rutherford, the brilliant little widow; she was in. love, madly, infatu- atedly, ten years ago—hopelessly, too, since she was already a wife and he a husband., She lost him, and look at her, Lt say, ~to-day—the lightest-headed, hardest-hearted flirt that ever lured ‘men to destruction. She makes me think, egad! ot those weird old stories of Norse sorceresses ‘and German nixies singing men to their fatal doom. She has done the | ‘loved-and-lost’? business thoroughly, but she. can. eat, drinl and be merry as well as the flintiest of us to-day.” M ae nage 8 “She may remember, for all that,’ the Frenel mnan. Bai ( pithily. “We don’t ¥ wear our heart on-our. caer this | of grace 1866—— “What