her have a kitchen and two servants'
rooms, Madame de la Baudraye wrote a few lines to her mother, begging
her to send her some linen and a loan of a thousand francs. She received
two trunks full of linen, some plate, and two thousand francs, sent by
the hand of an honest and pious cook recommended her by her mother.

Ten days after the evening at the theatre when they had met, Monsieur
de Clagny came to call at four o'clock, after coming out of court, and
found Madame de la Baudraye making a little cap. The sight of this proud
and ambitious woman, whose mind was so accomplished, and who had queened
it so well at the Chateau d'Anzy, now condescending to household cares
and sewing for the coming infant, moved the poor lawyer, who had just
left the bench. And as he saw the pricks on one of the taper fingers he
had so often kissed, he understood that Madame de la Baudraye was not
merely playing at this maternal task.

In the course of this first interview the magistrate saw to the depths
of Dinah's soul. This perspicacity in a man so much in love was a
superhuman effort. He saw that Didine meant to be the journalist's
guardian spirit and lead him into a nobler road; she had seen that
the difficulties of his practical life were due to some moral defects.
Between two beings united by love--in one so genuine, and in the other
so well feigned--more than one confidence had been exchanged in the
course of four months. Notwithstanding the care with which Etienne
wrapped up his true self, a word now and then had not failed to
enlighten Dinah as to the previous life of a man whose talents were
so hampered by poverty, so perverted by bad examples, so thwarted by
obstacles beyond his courage to surmount. "He will be a greater man if
life is easy to him," said she to herself. And she strove to make him
happy, to give him the sense of a sheltered home by dint of such economy
and method as are familiar to provincial folks. Thus Dinah became
a housekeeper, as she had become a poet, by the soaring of her soul
towards the heights.

"His happiness will be my absolution."

These words, wrung from Madame de la Baudraye by her friend the lawyer,
accounted for the existing state of things. The publicity of his
triumph, flaunted by Etienne on the evening of the first performance,
had very plainly shown the lawyer what Lousteau's purpose was. To
Etienne, Madame de la Baudraye was, to use his own phrase, "a fine
feather in his cap." Far from