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Such was the vision in her youthful mind, added to by degrees as she grew into young-ladyhood and surreptitiously became familiar with the writings of Ouida and the Duchess, and other literature of an educating cosmopolitan nature. Honora's biography should undoubtedly contain a sketch of Mrs. Randolph Leffingwell.
"Then all the more of a compliment that he should have given her the watch!" I said. And I fancy I had him there. That is the sort of man who interrupts his wife's dinner-stories all the way through with, "1812, my dear"; "Ouida, not Emerson"; "Herod, not Homer"; until I shouldn't be surprised to see her throw a plate at his head.
Now Edna had met this fascinating word only in the novels of Ouida, her hard-worked little mother kept a long row of them in the upstairs storeroom, behind the linen chest. In Huntington, women who bore that relation to men were called by a very different name, and their lot was not an enviable one; of all the shabby and poor, they were the shabbiest.
It is scarcely necessary for me to state that her Highness had her own ideas of what a husband should be like, gathered, no doubt, from execrable translations from "Ouida" and the gentle Miss Braddon. A girl of twenty usually has a formidable regard for romance, and the princess was fully up to the manner of her kind. If she could not marry romantically, she refused to marry at all.
In its celebration of successful crime, and its representation under a heroic aspect of villains and blacklegs, no species of fiction is more false to nature or more injurious to youthful readers. To such writers as George A. Lawrence and "Ouida" the world is indebted for the "Muscular Novel," which combines all the worst elements of both fashionable and criminal narrative.
She found the work of the Sphere very heavy, and she tried to remember the name of some saint, but for the life of her she couldn't think of any, so she called upon Ouida and Rhoda Broughton. Then she peeped through the keyhole again, and finding that the pope was listening, she squirted water into his ear. The other Ecclesiastical Commissioners remained in the background, looking anxious.
He was quite alone; and "Ouida," who, apart from her affectations, was a very remarkable woman, had had no difficulty in securing his frequent company at her villa, where she fed him at an incredible price with precociously ripe strawberries.
"H'm Wilkins if you can run across one of them in the servants' quarters you might leave it by my bed to-night." "Yes, sir." "And h'm, Wilkins you can put it under that book of Herbert Spencer's my daughter gave me yesterday. Under it, Wilkins and, h'm, Wilkins you needn't mention it to anybody. Ouida ain't cultured, Wilkins, but she's damn' good reading.
With this purpose in view she called one day on Lady Salisbury, who, never having seen her before, was much amazed by her entrance, and was still more amazed when Ouida, in confidential tones, said, "I have come to tell you that the one man for Paris is Robert." Lady Salisbury's answer was not very encouraging. It consisted of the question, "And pray, if you please, who is Robert?"
Gosse adds, with reference to men's passive acquiescence in this monstrous folly of "emancipation," that possibly our quiet may be the calm before the storm; and she utters this warning, which, also, more strongly, "Ouida" has uttered: "How would it be with us if the men should suddenly rise en masse and throw the whole surging lot of us into convents and harems?"
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