But now she studied one through all the fine, quickened, unerring
instincts of jealousy; and there is no instinct in the world that gives
such thorough appreciation of the very rival it reviles. She saw the
courtly negligence, the regal grace, the fair, brilliant loveliness, the
delicious, serene languor, of a pure aristocrate for the very first time
to note them, and they made her heart sick with a new and deadly sense;
they moved her much as the white, delicate carvings of the lotus-lilies
had done; they, like the carvings, showed her all she had missed. She
dropped her head suddenly like a wounded bird, and the racy, vindictive
camp oaths died off her lips. She thought of herself as she had danced
that mad bacchic bamboula amid the crowd of shouting, stamping, drunken,
half-infuriated soldiery; and for the moment she hated herself more even
than she hated that patrician yonder.
"I know what he meant now!" she pondered, and her spirited, sparkling,
brunette face was dark and weary, like a brown, sun-lightened brook
over whose radiance the heavy shadow of some broad-spread eagle's wings
hovers, hiding the sun.
She looked once, twice, thrice, more inquiringly, envyingly, thirstily;
then, as the band under the cedars rolled out their music afresh, and
light laughter echoed to her from the terrace, she turned and
wound herself back under the cover of the shrubs; not joyously and
mischievously as she had come, but almost as slowly, almost as sadly, as
a hare that the greyhounds have coursed drags itself through the grasses
and ferns.
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