Ouida Illustrated Author:Ouida General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1893 Original Publisher: P. F. Collier Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can s... more »elect from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: I had a passion of scorn for such shame: and yet the weight of it was heavy on my child's heart, for I had a vague, shapeless, unreasoned-on sense of foreboding that as my father had judged, so would the world judge likewise. Mariuccia comforted me in her tender, homely fashion, and washed clean the peacocks' plumes, and set them up over the stove with a palm-sheaf blessed for good luck in Holy Week. But at evening-time she told me sadly that my father had forbidden her to allow me ever again to visit any of the students. The 'loss of that cheery, good-natured, chivalrous, riotous companionship of theirs cost me many and many an hour of rebellious tears, and from that moment I ceased to be loyal to my father. I would look at the peacock sceptre again and again, and think to myself, -- "If yon had been of gold and ivory, he would have praised you." And I loved my feather-thyrsus all the more tenderly for others' neglect; and a settled scorn fired itself in me, and killed love. CHAPTER VI. MATER DOLOROSA. So things went on, until I reached my fifteenth year. I was tall -- for I had the open-air life which develops the limbs and strengthens the body, -- but I was still in my ways and my tastes quite a child. Raffaellino grew apace, too, and his people talked of his entering the priesthood; they did not know what to do with him; he had no taste for any hand- trade; he was forever haunting the churches; and to his mother, who was a religious soul, there seemed no life more beautiful or blessed than life amidst the silent marble cloisters, and the perpetual calm o...« less