Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/36

Rh Every word that he uttered he meant; in the excitement of the instant, sweeping down all the suave and hardened coldness of his temperament, he felt the power in him to do and to dare greatly; he felt that for her, through her, with her, there should be no limit to the ambition and the triumph of his life; he spoke wildly, blindly, exaggeratedly, but he spoke with an exaltation that for the second made him a nobler and a truer man than he had been in all the cool scorn of his wisdom and his mockery. Yet he did not move her, much less did he win her.

She looked at him with a smile in her eyes, and a haughty languor in her attitude. She—merciless from knowing the world too well, and gifted with a penetration far beyond the common range of women—saw that the gold offered her was adulterated; that the springs of his speech were as much self-love as love.

"I understand you," she said, as he paused. "I could advance your ambitions well, and you would be glad that I should do so; your vanity, your policy, your schemes, and—perhaps a little, too—your admiration, are all excited and chime in with another one; and that compound you call love. Well, it is as good a name for it as anything else.