Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/97

86 world I was steeped in it, from the telling of Roman cynics, and Athenian sages, and Persian magi, and Byzantine wits. I believed with all the credulous innocence of my own childhood, and I disbelieved with all the scornful scepticism of my dead masters. I had studied more deeply while I was yet a child than many men do in their whole lifetime. From that lonely meditative life in Greece I was often changed, as by magic, to the unbridled luxury and indulgence of the Roumelian castle. Slaves forestalled my every wish; splendour, the most enervating that could be dreamt of, surrounded me within, while the grandest natural beauty was everywhere without; if vice there were, I never saw it, but the most gorgeous pleasures amused me, and my bidding was done like the commands of an empress, for I was the adopted heir of the great Julian, Count VassaJis. Now can you not imagine how two such phases of life, alternating in their broadest and most dangerous contrasts from my earliest memory upward, made me fatal indeed to others, but to none so fatal as to myself?"

She laid her hands on his lips to arrest the words he would have spoken, and passed on in her narrative.

"No. No deniai God grant I be not fatal at