Page:Wanda, by Ouida.djvu/32

Rh passion. Her palate in pleasure was at once hardened and fastidious; it required strong food, and her audacity in search of it was not easily daunted. She knew, too, that he had some secret which his wife did not share ; she was resolved to penetrate it. She had tried all other means ; there only now remained one — to surprise or to beguile it from himselť. To this end, cautious and patient as a cat, she had resumed her intimacy .with them as relations, and with all the delicate arts of which she was a proficient, strove to make her companionship agreeable and necessary to him. Before long he became sensible of a certain unwholesorae charm in her society. He went with her to the opera, he took her to pass hours amidst the Noira col- lection, he rode with her often ; now and then he dined with her alone, or almost alone, in a small oval room of pure Japanese, where great silvery birds and white lilies iseemed to float on a golden field, and the dishes were silver lotus leaves, and the lamps burned in pale green transiucent gourds hanging on silver stalks.

An artificial woraan is nothing without her mise en schne ; transplanted amidst natural landscape and out-of-door life she is apt to become either ridiculous or tiresome. Mdrae. Brancka in Paris was in her own playhouse ; she looked well, and was in her own manner irresistible.