Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/154

Rh full reflection in the long mirrors, diamonds and all, before she rang for her maid to come to her.

It was a brilliant and beautiful figure that she saw there in the gorgeous colours copied from a picture by Watteau le Jeune, and with the great stones shining above her head and on her breast like so many little dazzling suns.

She had loved herself very dearly all her life, lived for herself, and in a refined and lofty way had been as absolutely self-engrossed and amorous of her own pleasure and her own vanities as the greediest and cruellest of ordinary egotists.

"Am I a fool?" she said, angrily, to her own image. "It is too absurd! Why should he move me more than anyone of all the others?"

And yet suddenly all the life which had so well satisfied her seemed empty—seemed cold and hard as one of her many diamonds.

She rang with haste and impatience for her maid; and all they did, from the hot soup they brought to the way they untwisted her hair, was wrong; and when she lay down in her bed she could not sleep, and when the bright forenoon came full of the sound of pealing bells and gay L 2