harming, is a disgrace
to a man of forty. Hitherto we have shared the burden of existence, and
it has not been lovely for this year and half. Out of devotion to me you
wear nothing but black, and that does me no credit."--Dinah gave one
of those magnanimous shrugs which are worth all the words ever
spoken.--"Yes," Etienne went on, "I know you sacrifice everything to my
whims, even your beauty. And I, with a heart worn out in past struggles,
a soul full of dark presentiments as to the future, I cannot repay your
exquisite love with an equal affection. We were very happy--without a
cloud--for a long time.--Well, then, I cannot bear to see so sweet a
poem end badly. Am I wrong?"

Madame de la Baudraye loved Etienne so truly, that this prudence, worthy
of de Clagny, gratified her and stanched her tears.

"He loves me for myself alone!" thought she, looking at him with smiling
eyes.

After four years of intimacy, this woman's love now combined every shade
of affection which our powers of analysis can discern, and which modern
society has created; one of the most remarkable men of our age, whose
death is a recent loss to the world of letters, Beyle (Stendhal), was
the first to delineate them to perfection.

Lousteau could produce in Dinah the acute agitation which may be
compared to magnetism, that upsets every power of the mind and body, and
overcomes every instinct of resistance in a woman. A look from him, or
his hand laid on hers, reduced her to implicit obedience. A kind word or
a smile wreathed the poor woman's soul with flowers; a fond look elated,
a cold look depressed her. When she walked, taking his arm and keeping
step with him in the street or on the boulevard, she was so entirely
absorbed in him that she lost all sense of herself. Fascinated by this
fellow's wit, magnetized by his airs, his vices were but trivial defects
in her eyes. She loved the puffs of cigar smoke that the wind brought
into her room from the garden; she went to inhale them, and made no
wry faces, hiding herself to enjoy them. She hated the publisher or
the newspaper editor who refused Lousteau money on the ground of the
enormous advances he had had already. She deluded herself so far as to
believe that her bohemian was writing a novel, for which the payment was
to come, instead of working off a debt long since incurred.

This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the
love of the heart and of the head--passion, capri