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 CHAPTER VI

"WORMWOOD" AND "THE SOUL OF LILITH"

Some day a selection of extracts from "The Works of Marie Corelli" will be published, and excellent reading it will prove. For, scattered about the novelist's goodly list of books, one may light on many interesting little observations concerning human nature which will well bear reproduction without the context. In the course of this biography a modest choice of Miss Corelli's thoughts on religion, men, women, education, and such-like topics will be found; but it is impossible in the narrow scope of the present publication to quote everything that one would like to.

Early in "Wormwood" there occurs a passage of the kind to which we refer. It is a pretty description of the ill-fated heroine of the story, and of her "soft and trifling chatter." Pauline de Charmilles is eighteen, newly home from school—"a child as innocent and fresh as a flower just bursting into bloom, with no knowledge of the world into which she was entering, and with certainly no idea of the power of her own beauty to rouse the passions of