was excited
by the anticipation of a little pleasure; she was expecting the Baronne
de Fontaine. Anna's husband, who was now Director-General under the
Minister of Finance, took advantage of leave of absence on the occasion
of his father's death to take his wife to Italy. Anna wished to spend
the day at Sancerre with her school-friend. This meeting was strangely
disastrous. Anna, who at school had been far less handsome than Dinah,
now, as Baronne de Fontaine, was a thousand times handsomer than the
Baronne de la Baudraye, in spite of her fatigue and her traveling
dress. Anna stepped out of an elegant traveling chaise loaded with Paris
milliners' boxes, and she had with her a lady's maid, whose airs quite
frightened Dinah. All the difference between a woman of Paris and a
provincial was at once evident to Dinah's intelligent eye; she saw
herself as her friend saw her--and Anna found her altered beyond
recognition. Anna spent six thousand francs a year on herself alone, as
much as kept the whole household at La Baudraye.

In twenty-four hours the friends had exchanged many confidences; and the
Parisian, seeing herself so far superior to the phoenix of Mademoiselle
Chamarolles' school, showed her provincial friend such kindness, such
attentions, while giving her certain explanations, as were so many stabs
to Dinah, though she perfectly understood that Anna's advantages all lay
on the surface, while her own were for ever buried.

When Anna had left, Madame de la Baudraye, by this time two-and-twenty,
fell into the depths of despair.

"What is it that ails you?" asked Monsieur de Clagny, seeing her so
dejected.

"Anna," said she, "has learned to live, while I have been learning to
endure."

A tragi-comedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye's
house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her
successive transformations--a drama to which no one but Monsieur de
Clagny and the Abbe Duret ever knew the clue, when Dinah in sheer
idleness, or perhaps sheer vanity, revealed the secret of her anonymous
fame.

Though a mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French
literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be
one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of
narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which
may excuse, though it cannot absolve Dinah, it is necessary to give an
analysis of a poem which was the outcome of