the sweetest of the comedies of which Eve invented the secret; but
the little man put it plainly to his wife that he gave her two hundred
francs a month for her personal expenses, and paid Madame Piedefer
twelve hundred francs a year as a charge on the lands of La Hautoy, and
that this was two hundred francs a year more than was agreed to under
the marriage settlement.

"I say nothing of the cost of housekeeping," he said in conclusion. "You
may give your friends cake and tea in the evening, for you must have
some amusement. But I, who spent but fifteen hundred francs a year as a
bachelor, now spend six thousand, including rates and repairs, and
this is rather too much in relation to the nature of our property. A
winegrower is never sure of what his expenses may be--the making, the
duty, the casks--while the returns depend on a scorching day or a sudden
frost. Small owners, like us, whose income is far from being fixed, must
base their estimates on their minimum, for they have no means of making
up a deficit or a loss. What would become of us if a wine merchant
became bankrupt? In my opinion, promissory notes are so many
cabbage-leaves. To live as we are living, we ought always to have
a year's income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of our
returns."

Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it; Dinah
flung herself against a will of iron padded round with gentleness. She
tried to fill the little man's soul with jealousy and alarms, but it
was stockaded with insolent confidence. He left Dinah, when he went to
Paris, with all the conviction of Medor in Angelique's fidelity. When
she affected cold disdain, to nettle this changeling by the scorn a
courtesan sometimes shows to her "protector," and which acts on him with
the certainty of the screw of a winepress, Monsieur de la Baudraye gazed
at his wife with fixed eyes, like those of a cat which, in the midst of
domestic broils, waits till a blow is threatened before stirring from
its place. The strange, speechless uneasiness that was perceptible under
his mute indifference almost terrified the young wife of twenty; she
could not at first understand the selfish quiescence of this man, who
might be compared to a cracked pot, and who, in order to live, regulated
his existence with the unchangeable regularity which a clockmaker
requires of a clock. So the little man always evaded his wife, while she
always hit out, as it were, ten feet above