wit, illumined and diverted her companions.
She Avas a inistress of all the arts of provo-
cation, and had a cruel power of making all
scruples of conscience and all honesties and
gravities of purpose seem absurd. She made
no disguise of her admiration of Sabran, and
conveyed the sense of it in a thousand delicate
and subtle modes of flattery. He. read her
very accuŕately, and had neither esteem nor
regard for her, and yet she had an attraction
for him. Her boudoir. all wadded coftly with
golden satin hke a jewel-box, with itsperpetual
odour of roses and its faint light coloured like
the roses, was a little temple of all the graces,
in which men were neither wise nor calm.
She had a power of turning their very souls
inside out like a glove, and after she had done
so they were never worth quite as rauch again.
The fascination which Sabran possessed for her
was that he never gave up his soul to her as
the others did; he was always beyoud her
reach; she was always conscious that she was
shut out from his inmost thoughts.
The sort of passion she had conceived for
him grew, because it was fanned by many
things — by his constancy to his wife, by his
personál beauty, by her vague eninity to Wanda,
by the sense of gtiilt and of indecency which
would attach in the worlďs sight to šuch a
Page:Wanda, by Ouida.djvu/31
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22
WANDA.