Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/158

Rh as a child in its swaddling bands; none the less so because she had been one of its leaders in those matters of supreme fashion wherein she had reigned as a goddess. Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great garden lily in a hothouse, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hothouse shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland. Now and then, garden lily in a stove-heated palace though she was, some vague want, some dim unfulfilled wish, had stirred in her; she began to think now that it had been for that unknown horizon.

"Men live too much in herds, in crowded rooms, amongst stoves and gas jets," he said to her once. "There are only two atmospheres that do one morally any good—the open air and the air of the cloister."

"You mean that there are only two things that are good—activity and meditation?"

"I think so. The fault of society is that it