Ouida

“ There was always in him something of the eagerness after absence of a lover; her mere presence always exercised over him a magnetism and a charm.
She raised herself on her elbow from the mass of sable furs and of wadded satin on which she had been lying; she had been rudely awakened by the cessation of the train's movement; the blaze of a lamp was in her eyes; she was impatient, and she yawned.
'Otho! my dear Otho!' she said with petulance, 'why will you always come to meet one at a railway station? Of all the many absurd customs of our generation that is the most absurd. ”

“ She was irritated, amazed, profoundly offended, and amazed with such grand vanity of amazement as Cleopatra might have felt had some memory of poor pale Octavia risen up betwixt her lover and herself.
He meanwhile went through the hushed dim corridors of the house with a pang the more at his heart. He had spoken in a moment of strong feeling, of freshly-awakened pain, and the coldness with which his confidence had been received, left its own frost upon his soul. He did not remember that which every man finds; that no sorrow for one woman will ever awaken sympathy in the breast of another. ”

“ I disappoint her perhaps as much as she chills me; it is inevitable, and is no one's fault that I know of; the fault lies with human nature.'
He paused. Damaris stood where she had been before, but the light had died down from the wood-fire, and the shadows of the twilight were upon her face. Her open-air, bird-like, flower-like life upon the island had made all life seem very simple to her, a thing regulated like the coming and going of the boats between the shores, broad and plain as the smooth sea sand of the mainland. ”

“ She had the triple beauty of youth, of health, of genius. There was the lavish glory of the springtime in her, as in the April fields when nature flings down flowers at every step. She should have been Heliodora to be crowned with white violets and blue hyacinths by the singer of Gadara, and he—if he had loved her, he might have opened his arms to her; but he looked in his own soul and no love of any kind was there.
Should he dare to offer her pale pity, mere tenderness, the fatigue of passions tired and chilled by another? ”

“ He saw all that she had hidden from him so carefully, through pride and shyness and the cruel humiliation of a love which knew itself powerless to awake response, of a soul which suffered in its innocence all the tortures of the damned. He had lived beside her seeing naught of that piteous conflict; parted from her by the wall built up out of his own indifference and coldness.
Had he even then been able to discern it, it would not have touched him, because of all chill things on earth the dullest is the heart of a man towards a love which he does not desire, which he cannot return. ”

“ Obscure people can do these things, they are happy; they are not set in the fierce light of publicity and society, and no one heeds it if they creep away to lay their aching heads under some lowly roof in solitude. But to a man well known and conspicuous in the life of the world, any such retreat into obscurity is impossible. He is bound hand and foot by a million threads, each strong as cables to hold him to his place. He cannot forsake his place without forsaking a mass of interests confided to his honour. ”

“ It was a sensation she had never experienced before, and it displeased her that she should be capable of feeling it.
'As if I were Jeannette and he were Jeanôt!' she thought with disdain for so bourgeois an emotion.
But it recalled to her sharply, painfully, what the world never had recalled to her hitherto; that the time must come to her, no less than to others, when her empire over all men would cease, when its sceptre would pass to other hands. It is a knowledge which hurts with the humiliation of dethronement every woman who has ever reigned. ”

“ As her lover he had always imagined that she, marble to all others, would be wax to him; he had always believed that he would light the flame of fervour behind the alabaster-like ice of her temperament. But he had learned his error. He had found that possession is not necessarily empire. He had discovered that he pleased her intelligence and her vanity rather than awakened her senses or her emotions. She had made him mortifyingly conscious that she found him of no higher stature than other men, and had unsparingly reminded him that there was no more fatal foe of love than familiarity. ”

“ Was it true, as he had said once to her, that you cannot obtain more from any nature than it possesses, and that all the forces of created life cannot draw fire from the smooth marble or make the pale pearl blush like the opal? Was it that she had it not in her to give any man more than that mingling of momentary aphrodisiacal indulgence and of eternal immutable derision; and that whilst her power to create a heaven of physical passion was so great, her power of satisfying the exactions of the heart and soul was slight? ”

“ Even Platon Napraxine, although her husband, had yet retained for her such utter devotion in his slow, rude, mute nature, that he had hungered for a rose from her bosom the night before he had gone out to be shot like a dog for her sake.
Of the mortification of waning ardour, of the slow sad change from fervour to apathy, of the great débâcle of all passion which so many women watch with hopeless and sinking hearts, as poor peasants of Alpine valleys watch the melting snow and stealing floods sweep away their homesteads—of these she had known nothing ”

“ Passion has died in him, died under the coldness of his wife's nature, as flowers die in frost. This child would give him, I daresay, all the richness and all the heat of her own heart, but he would only give her in return les cendres tièdes d'un feu éteint, and, as he is a man more generous and more sensitive than most, he would never forgive himself for having sacrificed her to himself. Better for her all the dangers of life in the world than the consuming love for one who would never love her as she loved. ”

“ There is nothing happy except youth, which does not know that it is so, and so goes through all the glories of its time ignorant, purblind, longing to cease to be youth.'
'I was quite happy on the island,' said Damaris wistfully.
'Then you were wiser than I ever was,' said Othmar, as he thought with a sort of remorse of how this innocent animal happiness, born of the waves, and the winds, and the sun, and the blossoms, and the radiant joy of mere living, had been destroyed by one breath and glimpse of the world, as a flower withers up in a flame, as a bird drops dead in carbonised air. ”

“ Othmar was silent some moments. How much or how little should he show of his real thoughts to this child, who loved him and whom he could not love in any way as she deserved? He thought she had merited candour at the least from him.
'Yes, dear; I care for her very much, to use your words. She has been all the world to me; in a sense she will be so always. Every great passion has a certain immortal element in it; at least I think so. She has been the one woman for whom I would have sinned any sin, have done any folly, have given up place and name, and honour, and all I had, if she had wished. ”