Page:Wanda, by Ouida.djvu/31

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