Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/101

90 time that T must in so much leave a blank to you. Those were with me who knew how to touch every chord in my nature, and they used their power ably. I was ambitious; they tempted my ambition. I loved, sovereignty; they pointed to such realms as might have dazzled wiser heads than mine when I first stood on that giddy eminence of command, and riches, and splendour, and was told that I had the beauty of a Helen, while I knew that I had the courage of men, and felt even stir in me men's genius and men's force. Do not deem me vain that I say this. God knows all vanity is dead in me, if I ever had it, and I think that I was at all times too proud to be guilty of that foible. And it was by higher things than such frailty that they lured me. I loved freedom; I loved the peoples; I rebelled against the despotism of mediocrities, the narrow bonds of priesthoods; I had the old libertíes of Greece in my veins, and I had the passionate longing for an immortal fame that all youth, which has any ideal desires at all, longs for with the longing 'of the moth for the star.' Well, through these, by these, I fell into the snares of those who draped their own selfish greeds and intrigues in the colours of the freedom that I adored; who knew how to tempt me with the pure laurels of a liberator,