Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/73

62 pecuniary and social, might any hour fall on him; that—stripped of the brilliance of his elegant world, and of the euphuisms of a political profession—he was neither more nor less in literal fact than a gamester, a spy, and a beggared speculator in the great hazards of European destinies. In such a mood he hated himself, he hated all he was allied with, he hated the world that he had the genius and the tact to rule, yet in which he absolutely owned not even a sum enough to save him from hopeless ruin whenever the fate that hung over him should fall. And a greater bitterness than even this came on him: for once he loved; for once he felt that greater, better, truer things might have been possible for him; for once a pang, almost as sharp as agony, seized him in dreaming of what he might have been.

For once he suffered.

Every disdainful word, every contemptuous glance, every cold rebuke, of the woman he coveted with the passion of ambition, as well as with the passion of love, seemed burned into his memory and perpetually before him. He could not even make her believe that he loved her!—that was the deadliest pang of all. Hate, cruel, fierce, remorseless, the most insatiate hate of all, the hate which springs