Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/173

162 her all the lovers and the vassals of Idalia. She reigned there, as she had reigned wherever her foot fell, since the day eight years before, when she had left the leafy shadows and the yellow corn-lands of Sparta to come out to this world of mystery, intrigue, romance, danger, and pleasure, which she had made so wholly her own.

It has been said, "Every woman is at heart a Bohemian." Idalia was one to the core, all proud and patrician though she was. The excitement and the peril of her life, with its vivid colour and its changing chances, she would not have exchanged for the eternal monotony of the most perfect calm; not even when she most utterly loathed, most utterly rebelled against the bondage which had entered in with the life she pursued. She was weary with herself often for the evil that she had done, she hated with an intense hatred the chains that had wound themselves round her freedom-loving, liberty-craving nature; but all the same, once plunged into the whirlpool of the dangers she directed, of the excitations she enjoyed, Idalia would not have laid them down and left them—left her sceptre and her peril—without a pang bitter as that which tears life out, without a lingering and unbearable regret. It is false philosophy to say that