Page:Wanda, by Ouida.djvu/15

6 this the meaning of civilisation — to make privacy impossible, to oblige every one to live under a lens?'

He had affected to agree with her, but in his heart he had not done so. He liked the fumes of the incense. So did his child.

'They will put this in the papers!' said Bela, when the snow came and he had his sledge out for the first time with four little Hungarian ponies.

'That is the poison of cities!' said Wanda, as she heard him. ' Who can have been so foolish as to tell him of the papers?'

'Your heir, my dear, will never want for reporters of any flattery,' said his father. 'It is as well he should run the gauntlet of them early.'

Bela listened, and said to his brother a little later: 'I like Paris. Paris prints everything we do, and the people read the print, and then they want to see us.'

'What good is that?' said Gela. 'I like home. They all of them know us; they don't want to see us. That is much better.'

'No, it isn't,' said Bela. 'One drives all day long at home, and there is nothing but the trees; here the trees are all people, and the people talk of us, and the people want to be us.'