Ouida Moths by Ouida - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78877-884-8
Verlag: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 9, 515 Seiten

Reihe: Delphi Parts Edition (Ouida)

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'Moths by Ouida - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)' from the bestselling edition of 'The Collected Works of Ouida'. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Ouida includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.eBook features:

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Autoren/Hrsg.

Ouida

Leseproben

CHAPTER I.
Lady Dolly ought to have been perfectly happy She had everything that can constitute the joys of a woman of her epoch. She was at Trouville. She had won heaps of money at play She had made a correct book on the races. She had seen her chief rival looking bilious in an unbecoming gown. She had had a letter from her husband to say he was going away to Java or Jupiter or somewhere indefinitely. She wore a costume which had cost a great tailor twenty hours of anxious and continuous reflection. Nothing but baptiste indeed! but baptiste sublimised and apotheosised by niello buttons, old lace, and genius. She had her adorers and slaves grouped about her. She had found her dearest friend out in cheating at cards. She had dined the night before at the Maison Persanne and would dine this night at the Maison Normande. She had been told a state secret by a minister which she knew it was shameful of him to have been coaxed and chaffed into revealing. She had had a new comedy read to her in manuscript-form three months before it would be given in Paris, and had screamed at all its indecencies in the choice company of a Serene Princess and two ambassadresses as they all took their chocolate in their dressing-gowns. Above all, she was at Trouville, having left half a million of debts behind her strewn about in all directions, and standing free as air in gossamer garments on the planks in the summer sunshine. There was a charming blue sea beside her; a balmy fluttering breeze around her, a crowd of the most fashionable sunshades of Europe before her, like a bed of full-blown anemones. She had floated and bobbed and swum and splashed semi-nude, with all the other mermaids à la mode, and had shown that she must still be a pretty woman, pretty even in daylight, or the men would not have looked at her so: and yet with all this she was not enjoying herself. It was very hard. The yachts came and went, the sands glittered, the music sounded, men and women in bright-coloured stripes took headers into the tide or pulled themselves about in little canoes; the snowy canvas of the tent shone like a huge white mushroom, and the faces of all the houses were lively with green shutters and awnings brightly striped like the bathers; people, the gayest and best-born people in Europe, laughed and chattered, and made love, and Lady Dolly with them, pacing the deal planks with her pretty high-heeled shoes; but for all that she was wretched. She was thinking to herself, “What on earth shall I do with her?” It ruined her morning. It clouded the sunshine. It spoiled her cigarette. It made the waltzes sound like dirges. It made her chief rival look almost good-looking to her. It made a gown combined of parrots’ breasts and passion-flowers that she was going to wear in the afternoon feel green, and yellow, and bilious in her anticipation of it, though it was quite new and a wonder. It made her remember her debts. It made her feel that she had not digested those écrevissses at supper. It made her fancy that her husband might not really go to Java or Jupiter. It was so sudden, so appalling, so bewildering, so endless a question; and Lady Dolly only asked questions, she never answered them or waited for their answers. After all, what could she do with her? She, a pretty woman and a wonderful flirt, who liked to dance to the very end of the cotillon, and had as many lovers as she had pairs of shoes. What could she do with a daughter just sixteen years old? “It makes one look so old!” she had said to herself wretchedly, as she had bobbed and danced in the waves. Lady Dolly was not old; she was not quite thirty-four, and she was as pretty as if she were seventeen, perhaps prettier; even when she was not “done up,” and she did not need to do herself up very much just yet, really not much, considering, — well, considering so many things, that she never went to bed till daylight, that she never ate anything digestible, and never drank anything wholesome, that she made her waist fifteen inches round, and destroyed her nerves with gambling, chloral, and many other things; considering these, and so many other reasons, besides the one supreme reason that everybody does it, and that you always look a fright if you don’t do it. The thought of her daughter’s impending arrival made Lady Dolly miserable. Telegrams were such horrible things. Before she had had time to realise the force of the impending catastrophe the electric wires had brought her tidings that the girl was actually on her way across the sea, not to be stayed by any kind of means, and would be there by nightfall. Nightfall at Trouville! When Lady Dolly in the deftest of summer-evening toilettes would be just opening her pretty mouth for her first morsel of salmon and drop of Chablis, with the windows open and the moon rising on the sea, and the card-tables ready set, and the band playing within earshot, and the courtiers all around and at her orders, whether she liked to go out and dance, or stay at home for poker or chemin de fer. “What in the world shall I do with her, Jack?” she sighed to her chief counsellor. The chief counsellor opened his lips, answered “Marry her!” then closed them on a big cigar. “Of course! One always marries girls; how stupid you are,” said Lady Dolly peevishly. The counsellor smiled grimly, “And then you will be a grandmother,” he said with a cruel relish: he had just paid a bill at a bric-à-brac shop for her and it had left him unamiable. “I suppose you think that witty,” said Lady Dolly with delicate contempt. “Well, Hélène there is a great-grandmother, and look at her!” Hélène was a Prussian princess, married to a Russian minister: she was arrayed in white with a tender blending about it of all the blues in creation, from that of a summer sky to that of a lapis lazuli ring; she had a quantity of fair curls, a broad hat wreathed with white lilac and convolvulus, a complexion of cream, teeth of pearl, a luminous and innocent smile; she was talking at the top of her voice and munching chocolate; she had a circle of young men round her; she looked, perhaps, if you wished to be ill-natured, eight-and-twenty. Yet a greatgrandmother she was, and the “Almanach de Gotha,” said so, and alas! said her age. “You won’t wear so well as Hélène. You don’t take care of yourself,” the counsellor retorted, with a puff of smoke between each sentence. “WHAT!” screamed Lady Dolly, so that her voice rose above the din of all the other voices, — the sound of the waves, the click-clack of the high heels, and the noise of the band. Not take care of herself! — she! who had every fashionable medicine that came out, and, except at Trouville, never would be awakened for any earthly thing till one o’clock in the day. “You don’t take care of yourself,” said the counsellor. “No; you eat heaps of sweetmeats. You take too much tea, too much ice, too much soup, too much wine; too much everything. You—” “Oh! if you mean to insult me and call me a drunkard — !” said Lady Dolly, very hotly flushing up a little. “You smoke quite awfully too much,” pursued her companion immovably “It hurts us, and can’t be good for you. Indeed, all you women would be dead if you smoked right; you don’t smoke right; you send all your smoke out, chattering; it never gets into your mouth even, and so that saves you all; if you drew it in, as we do, you would be dead, all of you. Who was the first woman that smoked I often wonder?” “The idea of my not wearing as well as Hélène,” pursued Lady Dolly, unable to forget the insult. “Well, there are five-and-twenty years between us, thank goodness, and more!” “I say you won’t,” said the counsellor, “not if you go on as you do, screaming all night over those cards and taking quarts of chloral because you can’t sleep? Why can’t you sleep? I can.” “All the lower animals sleep like tops,” said Lady Dolly. “You seem to have been reading medical treatises, and they haven’t agreed with you. Go and buy me a ‘Petit Journal.’” The counsellor went grumbling and obedient — a tall, good-looking, well-built, and very fair Englishman, who had shot everything that was shoo table all over the known world. Lady Dolly smiled serenely on the person who glided to her elbow, and took the vacant place; a slender, pale, and graceful Frenchman, the Duc de Dinant of the vieille souche. “Dear old Jack gets rather a proser,” she thought, and she began to plan a fishing picnic with her little Duke; a picnic at which everybody was to go barefooted, and dress like peasants — real common peasants, you know, of course, — and dredge, didn’t they call it, and poke about, and hunt for oysters. Lady Dolly had lovely feet, and could afford to uncover them; very few of her rivals could do so, a fact of which she took cruel advantage, and from which she derived exquisite satisfaction in clear shallows and rock pools. “The donkeys! they’ve cramped themselves in tight boots!” she said to herself, with the scorn of a superior mind. She always gave her miniature feet and arched insteps their natural play, and therein displayed a wisdom of which it must be honestly confessed, the rest of her career gave no glimpse. The counsellor bought the “Petit...