You Might As Well Invite A Bilious
Nut-Fooder To A Lord Mayor's Banquet.
The mention of banquets reminds me that she was blamed for preferring
the society of duchesses and diplomats to that of the Florentine
literati, as if there were something reprehensible in Ouida's fondness
for decent food and amusing talk when she could have revelled in Ceylon
tea and dough-nuts and listened to babble concerning Quattro-Cento
glazes in any of the fifty squabbling art-coteries of that City of
Misunderstandings. It was one of her several failings, chiefest among
them being this: that she had no reverence for money. She was unable to
hoard - an unpardonable sin. Envied in prosperity, she was smugly pitied
in her distress. Such is the fate of those who stand apart from the
crowd, among a nation of canting shopkeepers. To die penniless, after
being the friend of duchesses, is distinctly bad form - a slur on
society. True, she might have bettered her state by accepting a
lucrative proposal to write her autobiography, but she considered such
literature a "degrading form of vanity" and refused the offer. She
preferred to remain ladylike to the last, in this and other little
trifles - in her lack of humour, her redundancies, her love of expensive
clothes and genuinely humble people, of hot baths and latinisms and
flowers and pet dogs and sealing-wax. All through life she made no
attempt to hide her woman's nature, her preference for male over female
company; she was even guilty of saying that disease serves the world
better than war, because it kills more women than men.
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