Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/129

 might be counted as national characteristics, the Lady Hilda was a very un-English Englishwoman in everything.

Indeed your true élégante is raised high above all such small things as nationalities; she floats serenely in an atmosphere far too elevated to be coloured by country; a neutral ground on which the leaders of every civilized land meet far away from all ordinary mortality.

In Floralia she found a few such choice spirits accustomed to breathe the same æther as herself, and with those she lived, carefully avoiding the Penal Settlement as she continued to call the cosmopolitan society which was outside the zone of her own supreme fashion.

She saw it, indeed, in ball-rooms and morning receptions; it sighed humbly after her, pined for her notice, and would have been happy if she would but even have recompensed it by an insolence, but she merely ignored its existence, and always looked over its head innocently and cruelly with that divine serenity of indifference and disdain with which Nature had so liberally endowed her.