Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/107

96 warm and strong as the love of men. Many women are cold sensualists, many are inordinately vain; sensualism and vanity make up nine-tenths of my sex's passions, though sentímentality has so long refused to think so."

"But you must have been surrounded by so many—by all that was most brilliant and most seductive?"

"Yes; yet a tinsel brilliancy, for the most part. Besides, I did not come into the world ignorant of it, as most youth comes. Julian Vassalis, and my own tastes, and others who influenced me then, had given me the surest shield against the follies of love in studies deeper far than most women, if they had driven away my faith in life too early, with the sneers of Persius, with the scourge of Juvenal, with their own cynic wit and their own manifold knowledge. Ambition was infínitely more the passion to tempt me than love ever was. I luxuriated in the sense of my own power, in the exercise of my own fatal gifts; but I scorned from the bottom of my heart the men who were fooled by such idle things as a girl's glance, as a woman's smile. If the gold gleam of my hair ensnared them, I could not but disdain what was so easily bound; if they were spaniels at my word, I knew they had been, or they