Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/372

Rh she dreaded to hear the tittering mockery of the women she had eclipsed so long at all her present weakness; it was all so poor, so base, so unworthy, yet it enchained her: the world had been her religion; no one casts off a creed long held without hard and cruel strife.

"Oh, my love, how far beneath you I am!" she thought, she whose pride had been a byeword, and whose superb vanity had been an invulnerable armour.

She could have kneeled down and kissed his hands for very humility; yet she could not resolve to yield.

"I might see him once more, before I go," she thought, and so coward-like she put the hour of decision from her. They must part, but she might see him once more first.

She would go away of course, and her life in the Winter City would be with the things of the past, and she would grow used to the pain of dead passion, and feel it less with time—other women did, and why not she?

So she said to herself; and yet at moments a sort