Marie Louise de la Ramée

“ Lady Hilda's eyebrows expressed unutterable contempt; these were sentiments to her entirely incomprehensible.
"How very agreeable—to make the streets the barometer of one's looks—'fair or foul.' So you live in apprehension of a railway porter's indifference, and only approve of yourself if a racing tout smiles! My dear Mila, I never did believe you would have gone lower in the scale of human adorers than your Gommeux and Poisseux."
"At all events I am not so vain as you are, Hilda," retorted the Comtesse. "You approve of yourself eternally, whether all the world hates you or not. ”

“ The horses sprang forward; he stood on the lower step, grave and lost in thought.
"Is it too early to offer felicitations, my friend?" said the Duc de St. Louis, passing to go homeward; he had been playing whist all night.
"I do not understand you," he answered, with the tranquil falsehood of society.
The question annoyed him deeply. He loved this woman with all the tenderness and passion of his temperament, and loved her the more for the ascendency he had gained over her and the faults that he saw in her; he loved her generously, truly, and with purer desire than most men. ”

“ If a few men and women had been made wretched for life, and people who loved one another devotedly had been parted for ever, and suspicion and hatred had crept into the place of trust and tenderness in certain households, Madame Mila could not help that, any more than one can help other people being splashed with mud when one drives down a lane in bad weather. And nobody ever thought Madame Mila could do any harm; pretty, good-natured, loquacious, little Madame Mila, running about with her little rosebuds at fancy fairs, and saying so sweetly, "Pour nos pauvres—pour nos chers pauvres!" ”

“ Here in Floralia, if we require gas-works we erect their chimneys on the very bank of our river, ruining one of the loveliest views in the world, and one that has been a tradition of beauty for ages. If it be deemed necessary to break down and widen our picturesque old bridges, we render them hideous as any railway road, by hedging them with frightful monotonous parapets of cast-iron, the heaviest, most soulless, most hateful thing that is manufactured. Do we make a fine hill-drive, costing us enormously, when we have no money to pay for it, we make one, indeed, as fine as any in Europe ”

“ I will go to Paris and paint your frescoes, Madame, if you will let me; I can paint in fresco and in tempera; I was a student in the Academy of San Luca in my time."
His words were light, and his manner also, but his eyes had a language that made the Lady Hilda colour a little and look out of the other window of her coupé.
"I must first call upon Olga; I have promised," she answered, irrelevantly. "But I will join you at your palace in an hour; perhaps she will come with me; I should not like to leave, certainly, without having seen your chapel. Au revoir." ”

“ That is what all you people call love; I am content enough to have no knowledge of it———"
"Good gracious, Hilda!" said Madame Mila, with wide-open eyes of absolute amazement; "you talk as if you were one of the angry husbands in a comedy of Feuillet or Dumas. I don't think you know anything about it at all; how should you? You only admire yourself, and like art and all that kind of thing, and are as cold as ice to everybody. ”

“ Habit is nothing better than a harness; even when it is one silvered and belled. You have exhausted everything too early; how can it have flavour? You pursue an unvarying routine of amusement: how can it amuse? The life of the great world is, after all, when we once know it well, as tiresome as the life of the peasant—perhaps more so. I know both."
"All that may be right enough," said the Lady Hilda, "but there is no help for it that I see. If the world is not amusing, that is not our fault. ”

“ I am prepared to admit, even in face of Madame Mila's direst wrath, that all forms of hazard are exceedingly injurious to the character and to the fortunes of every person tempted by them. It may be impossible even to exaggerate their baneful influences or their disastrous consequences. But how can a government which publicly patronizes, sustains, and enriches itself by lotteries, have any logic in condemning the pastime of hazard in a private drawing-room or a private club-house? I confess I cannot see how they reconcile both courses. A government, whatever it be, should never be an anomaly. ”

“ How can Love be of much power where it is inferior to fox-hunting, and a mere interlude when there is no other sport to be had, as it is with Englishmen?"
"And with a Frenchman it is always inferior to himself!" confessed the French Duc, with a smile. "At least they say so. But every human being loves his vanity first. 'Only wounded my vanity?' poor Lord Strangford used to say. 'Pray what dearer and more integral part of myself could you wound?' He was very right. If we are not on good terms with ourselves we can never prevail with others." ”

“ Like a caged animal she paced to and fro the long length of the stone terrace.
She was all alone.
The flower-like radiance of the declining day shone everywhere around, the birds sang, the dreamy bells rang in the Ave Maria from hill to hill, all was so still, so peaceful, so beautiful; yet with the setting of the sun, his life might go out in darkness.
In her great misery, her soul was purified. The fire that consumed her burned away the dross of the world, the alloy of selfishness and habit and vain passions. "Oh, God! give me his life, and I will give him mine!" ”

“ Della Rocca received them in the southern loggia, a beautiful vaulted and frescoed open gallery, designed by Bramante, and warm in the noonday sun, as though January were June.
A king could not have had more grace of welcome and dignity of courtesy than this ruined gentleman—he had a very perfect manner, certainly, thought Lady Hilda once again. She was one of those women (they are many) upon whom manner makes more impression than mind or morals. Why should it not? It is the charm of life and the touchstone of breeding. ”

“ She hated herself, and yet she could not change herself. She cared for power, for supremacy, for indulgence, for extravagance; she dreaded to hear the tittering mockery of the women she had eclipsed so long at all her present weakness; it was all so poor, so base, so unworthy, yet it enchained her: the world had been her religion; no one casts off a creed long held without hard and cruel strife.
"Oh, my love, how far beneath you I am!" she thought, she whose pride had been a byeword, and whose superb vanity had been an invulnerable armour. ”

“ Madame Mila, as her friends always called her, was as pretty a little woman as could be imagined, who enamelled herself to such perfection that she had a face of fifteen, on the most fashionable and wonderfully costumed of bodies; she was very fond of her cousin Hilda, because she could borrow so much money of her, and she had come to Floralia this winter because in Paris there was a rumour that she had cheated at cards—false, of course, but still odious. ”

“ Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia, for the main part, do not see the city they come to winter in; see nothing of its glories, of its sanctities, of its almost divinities; see only their own friends, their own faces, their own fans, flirtations, and fallals, reflected as in mirrors all around them, and filling up their horizon.
"A Dutchman can be just as solemnly and entirely contemplative of a lemon-pip and a cheese-paring as an Italian of the Virgin in glory." ”

“ With a soft grace of action he touched with his lips the hem of her riding skirt.
"No," he said simply, "you might indeed 'daze one to blindness like the noonday sun.' But I am not blind. I see in you many errors, more against yourself than others; I see the discontent which always argues high unsatisfied desire, and the caprice which is merely the offshoot of too long indulgence of all passing fancies; but what matter these?—your nature and the nobility of it lie underneath them in a vein of gold unworked. ”

“ Madame Mila, clad in the strictest directoire costume, with a wonderful hat on her head that carried feathers, grasses, oleander flowers, and a bird of Dutch Guiana, and was twisted up on one side in a miraculous manner, descended with her Maurice to the Lady Hilda's victoria, lent her for the day. To drive into the country at all was an act abominable and appalling to all her ideas. ”

“ With us Nature is too riante for us to grow morbid about it. The sunshine that laughs around us nine months of every year, the fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very sea sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow up amongst from infancy makes our love of Nature only a kind of unconscious joy in it—but here even the peasant has that, and the songs of the men that cannot read or write are full of it. ”

“ She had only put on her mask for entry, and had now laid it beside her; she threw aside her domino, for the heat of the box was stifling, and the whiteness of her dress shone as lilies do at moonlight. She leaned her cheek on her hand, and looked down on to the romping, screaming, many-coloured throngs.
"You are not well to-night, Madame?" said the Duc, with the affectionate solicitude that he felt for all pretty women. ”

“ Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that always will get in the golden slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.
The Lady Hilda looked out of the window and found it raining heavily. When the sky of Floralia does rain, it does it thoroughly, and gets the disagreeable duty over, which is much more merciful to mankind than the perpetual drizzle and dripping of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or Middlesex. ”

“ Taste, mon cher Della Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these matters. Women, believe me, never have any principle. Principle is a backbone, and no woman—except bodily—ever possesses any backbone. Their priests and their teachers and their mothers fill them with doctrines and conventionalities—all things of mere word and wind. No woman has any settled principles; if she have any vague ones, it is the uttermost she ever reaches, and those can always be overturned by any man who has any influence over her. But Taste is another matter altogether. ”

“ Even an ugly woman ought to be taught that it is her duty to make her ugliness as little disagreeable as possible. If the eyes and the taste of women were cultivated by artistic study, an ill-dressed woman would become an impossibility. If I were ever so poor," continued the Lady Hilda impressively, "if I were ever so poor, and had to sew my own gowns, and make them of serge or of dimity, I would cut them so that Giorgione or Gainsborough, if they were living, would be able to look at me with complaisancy—or at all events without a shudder. ”

“ There was a wonderful dreamy, lulling charm in this olive-hidden solitude; she did not care to move, to think, to analyze. He did not speak to her of love; they both avoided words, which, spoken, might break the spell of their present peace and part them; but every now and then his eyes looked into hers, and were heavy with the langour of silent passion, and stirred her heart to strange sweet tumult. ”

“ Riches could add nothing to her; the highest rank could scarcely be any charm to her; she has everything she can want or wish for;—if she had the power of wishing left, which I doubt. The only spell that might enchain her would be love, if she have any capacity to feel it, which I doubt also. Well—granted love aroused,—what would poverty or riches in her lover matter to one who has secured for ever a golden pedestal of her own from which to survey the woes of the world? ”

“ The Lady Hilda laughed a little.
"I can't follow you. I do not feel them. I like Clairvaux, my brother, certainly, but we go years without seeing each other quite contentedly."
"I spoke of affections, other affections," replied Della Rocca, with a little impatience. "There is nothing else that gives warmth or colour to life. Without them there is no glow in its pictures, they are all painted en grisaille. Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has any force, or mind any high intelligence. ”

“ This simplicity, this naturalness, which in the Italian will often underlie the highest polish of culture and of ceremony, had a curious fascination for a woman in whose own life there had been no place for simplicity and no thought for nature.
She had been in the bonds of the world always, as a child in its swaddling bands; none the less so because she had been one of its leaders in those matters of supreme fashion wherein she had reigned as a goddess. Her life had been altogether artificial ”

“ Madame Mila on occasion had helped or hindered circumstance amongst her friends and enemies with many ingenious little devices and lucky little anonymous notes, and other innocent shifts and stratagems. It was no use being in the world at all unless you interfered with the way it went; to be a mere puppet in the hands of Fate, with the strings of accident dangling to and fro, seemed to her clever little brains quite unworthy the intelligence of woman. ”

“ Her theories melted away into pure reverence, her philosophies faded into tenderness; new revelations of human life came to her before those spiritual imaginings of men to whom the blue sky had seemed full of angels, and the watches of the night been stirred by the voice of God: before those old panels and old frescoes, often so simple, often so pathetic, always so sincere in faith and in work, she grew herself simpler and of more humility, and learned that art is a religion for whose right understanding one must needs become "even as a little child." ”

“ Lady Hilda looked up from the S. Ursula, which she was finishing:
"My dear Mila!—you know perfectly well how I detest that kind of thing. Teresa's songs, drag seats, and eager efforts to imitate the worst kind of women!—go to it, if it amuse you; but, with all gratitude, allow me to decline."
"How disagreeable you are!" said Madame Mila, pettishly. "One must do something with oneself all these long days: if it were Palestrina, I suppose you would go." ”

“ They were on a tolerably broad road, with a village above them, on a steep green vine-clad hill; there were the usual olive orchards everywhere, with great almond trees full of blossom and white as driven snow, and farther still all around the countless curves of the many mountain spurs that girdle the valley of Floralia. There was another stone wall in front of them; beyond it the turf looked fresh and pleasant; she put Saïd at it, but someone from a distance called out to her in Italian, "For God's sake stop the horse!" ”