CHAPTER VI
"WORMWOOD" AND "THE SOUL OF LILITH"
Some day a selection of extracts from "The
Works of Marie Corelli" will be published, and excellent
reading it will prove. For, scattered about
the novelist's goodly list of books, one may light on
many interesting little observations concerning human
nature which will well bear reproduction without
the context. In the course of this biography a
modest choice of Miss Corelli's thoughts on religion,
men, women, education, and such-like topics
will be found; but it is impossible in the narrow
scope of the present publication to quote everything
that one would like to.
Early in "Wormwood" there occurs a passage of the kind to which we refer. It is a pretty description of the ill-fated heroine of the story, and of her "soft and trifling chatter." Pauline de Charmilles is eighteen, newly home from school—"a child as innocent and fresh as a flower just bursting into bloom, with no knowledge of the world into which she was entering, and with certainly no idea of the power of her own beauty to rouse the passions of
