audraye sententiously.

"No," said the master of the house, lighting his candle to go to bed,
"for she has a lover."

"For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has
some spunk," said Lousteau.

"Well, he must have something!" replied Bianchon.

Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon's
remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that the
physician could guess the mystery of this woman's life; her premature
wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.

But Dinah did not guess, on her part, the ominous prophecy contained for
her in her husband's little speech, which her kind old Abbe Duret, if he
had been alive, would not have failed to elucidate. Little La Baudraye
had detected in Dinah's eyes, when she glanced at the journalist
returning the ball of his jests, that swift and luminous flash of
tenderness which gilds the gleam of a woman's eye when prudence is cast
to the winds, and she is fairly carried away. Dinah paid no more heed to
her husband's hint to her to observe the proprieties than Lousteau had
done to Dinah's significant warnings on the day of his arrival.

Any other man than Bianchon would have been surprised at Lousteau's
immediate success; but he was so much the doctor, that he was not even
nettled at Dinah's marked preference for the newspaper-rather than the
prescription-writer! In fact, Dinah, herself famous, was naturally
more alive to wit than to fame. Love generally prefers contrast to
similitude. Everything was against the physician--his frankness, his
simplicity, and his profession. And this is why: Women who want
to love--and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved--have an
instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing
occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter
of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with
a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led
the half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen
insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not
confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind--"The
doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not like him."

Then, again, she reflected on his professional duties, wondering whether
a woman could ever be anything but a _subject_ to a medical man, who saw
so many subjects in the course of a day's work. The first sentence of
the aphorism wr