"Poor woman!" said the lawyer, as he walked away. And this justice we
will do him--for to whom should justice be done unless to a Judge?--he
loved Dinah too sincerely to regard her degradation as a means of
triumph one day; he was all pity and devotion; he really loved her.

The care and nursing of the infant, its cries, the quiet needed for the
mother during the first few days, and the ubiquity of Madame Piedefer,
were so entirely adverse to literary labors, that Lousteau moved up
to the three rooms taken on the first floor for the old bigot. The
journalist, obliged to go to the first performances without Dinah, and
living apart from her, found an indescribable charm in the use of his
liberty. More than once he submitted to be taken by the arm and dragged
off to some jollification; more than once he found himself at the house
of a friend's mistress in the heart of bohemia. He again saw women
brilliantly young and splendidly dressed, in whom economy seemed treason
to their youth and power. Dinah, in spite of her striking beauty, after
nursing her baby for three months, could not stand comparison with these
perishable blossoms, so soon faded, but so showy as long as they live
rooted in opulence.

Home life had, nevertheless, a strong attraction for Etienne. In three
months the mother and daughter, with the help of the cook from
Sancerre and of little Pamela, had given the apartment a quite changed
appearance. The journalist found his breakfast and his dinner served
with a sort of luxury. Dinah, handsome and nicely dressed, was careful
to anticipate her dear Etienne's wishes, and he felt himself the king
of his home, where everything, even the baby, was subject to his
selfishness. Dinah's affection was to be seen in every trifle, Lousteau
could not possibly cease the entrancing deceptions of his unreal
passion.

Dinah, meanwhile, was aware of a source of ruin, both to her love and
to the household, in the kind of life into which Lousteau had allowed
himself to drift. At the end of ten months she weaned her baby,
installed her mother in the upstairs rooms, and restored the family
intimacy which indissolubly links a man and woman when the woman is
loving and clever. One of the most striking circumstances in Benjamin
Constant's novel, one of the explanations of Ellenore's desertion, is
the want of daily--or, if you will, of nightly--intercourse between
her and Adolphe. Each of the lovers has a separate home; they have