Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/288

Rh "It would have been a great pity had Miladi been anything save what she is," said Della Rocca, to whom he expressed himself in this manner, in such French as he could command, and who was amused and astonished by him, and who took him a day's wild fowl shooting in the marshes, and a day's wild boar hunting in the next province, and wondered constantly why so kindly and gallant a gentleman should have been made by the good God so very stupid.

"Oh, you think so; I don't," said Lord Clairvaux. "Hilda isn't my idea of a happy woman. I don't believe she is happy. She spends half her life thinking how she will dress herself; and why will they dress now like the ruffs and things of Queen Elizabeth, and the effigies on the tombstones? and the other half she spends buying things she never looks at, and ordering things she dislikes when they're done, and reading books that make her think her own countrymen are a mere lot of block-heads and barbarians. Not that I pretend to understand her; I never did; only I think if