Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/24

Rh as ants in hers. She detested drives in pony-carriages, humdrum chit chat, and afternoon tea in the library; she did not care in the least who had bagged how many brace; the details of fast runs with hounds were as horribly tiresome to her as the boys home from Eton; and she would rather have gone a pilgrimage to Lourdes than have descended to the ball, where all sorts of nondescripts had to be asked, and the dresses positively haunted her like ghosts.

Five years before, at Broomsden, she had taken up her candlestick after three nights of unutterable boredom between her sister-in-law and a fat duchess, and had mentally vowed never to return there. The vow she had kept, and she had always seen Clairvaux in Paris, in London, in Baden—anywhere rather than in the home of their childhood, towards which she had no tenderness of sentiment, but merely recollections of the fierce tyrannies of many German governesses.

She would often buy him a colt out of the Lagrange or Lafitte stables; and always send half Boissier's and Siraudin's shops to his children Rh