Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/208

Rh pitiless growth of mingled envy, admiration, and ambition, which, long after all tenderness has perished out of it, will retain all its imperious egotism, and all its thirst for sweeping destruction of everything preferred before it. An acríd bitterness against her for her príde, her power, her keen wit, and her fearless intellect, had been blent with the earliest hours of his subjugation to her; and this served now to strengthen tenfold the fierce, mute, aching impatience with which he now mused on the possibility that this woman, so cold, so merciless, so full of mockery for him, had ever stooped to the weakness she had often played with, and so often rídiculed.

"Is it possible! Is it possible!" he muttered, while his delicate lips sbook and worked in the anguish which, in a youth, would have been spent in tears. "She—so victorious, so ironic, so chill, so world-worn, love for sake of a wanderer's eagle glances, a rough-rider's lion-graces! She!—a woman who could fill a throne, and rule it single-handed. Psbaw! she is a voluptuary, she is a coquette, she has her caprices—Miladi! And he is handsome as a gladiator. She loves him—oh yes— she loves him for six months, six weeks, six days. And what price will he pay for the paradise?"