Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/368

Rh is quite a pity there is no Ariosto to celebrate such a feat. It is very Ariosto-like. Indeed, all the best Italians are so. Englishmen have long ceased to be in any manner Shakesperian; but Italians remain like their poets."

The Duc wandered away into the subtlest and most discursive analysis of the Ariostian school and of the national characteristics which it displayed and was nurtured on; but she had no ear to hear it:

Outwardly she sat indifferent and calm, but her brain and her heart were in tumult with the sweetest, loftiest, grandest pride that she had ever known—pride without egotism, without vanity, without a thought of self; true pride, exultant in heroism, not the arrogant pride of self-culture, of self-worship, of self-love, not the paltry pride of rank and acquisition and physical perfection, not the pride of which all the while she had been half contemptuous herself. And then—his life was safe!

Yet, had he stood before her then she must have given him the same answer—at least, she thought so.