all 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 his head.

Dinah's fits of fury when she saw herself condemned never to escape from
La Baudraye and Sancerre are more easily imagined than described--she
who had dreamed of handling a fortune and managing the dwarf whom she,
the giant, had at first humored in order to command. In the hope of some
day making her appearance on the greater stage of Paris, she accepted
the vulgar incense of her attendant knights with a view to seeing
Monsieur de la Baudraye's name drawn from the electoral urn; for she
supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice from Paris,
each time a step higher on the social ladder. But when she struck on the
man's heart, it was as though she had tapped on marble! The man who had
been Receiver-General and Referendary, who was now Master of Appeals,
Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Royal Commissioner, was but a mole
throwing up it