Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/252

Rh closed on her, he walked away to his own old house.

Lady Hilda went up to her own rooms; she had a knot of violets with her. Before she put them in water she touched them with her lips—as any girl of sixteen or any peasant Gretchen might have done.

That night at the Princess Fürstenberg's—one of the pleasantest houses of the winter city—men and women both said to one another that they had never seen her looking more beautiful, or more magnificent in the blaze of her jewels, but they found her colder, and more difficult to converse with than ever, and were more than ever hopelessly impressed with the sense" of their own absolute nullity in her eyes.

He was not there.

She stayed but a brief time; long enough to chill every one there like ice, which was the effect she always produced in society, when it was so unhappy as not to please her; then, having frozen it, she left it,—the ladies who remained breathing freer when her delicate loveliness and her mighty emeralds had ceased to outshine