Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/11

4 and peasants, and make your whole province impoverished and ill-content for the mere sake of pleasing some strangers by the stucco and the hoardings that their eyes are used to at home;—well, that perhaps may be an open question.

The Lady Hilda Vorarlberg had written thus far when she got tired, left off, and looked out of the window on to the mountain-born and poet-hymned river of Floralia. She had an idea that she would write a novel; she was always going to do things that she never did do.

After all they were not her own ideas that she had written; but only those of a Floralian, the Duca della Rocca, whom she had met the night before. But then the ideas of everybody have been somebody else's beforehand,—Plato's, or Bion's, or Theophrastus's; or your favourite newspaper's;—and the Lady Hilda, although she had been but two days in the Winter City, had already in her first drive shuddered at the stucco and the hoardings, and shivered at the boulevards and the little shaven trees. For she was a person of very refined and