elf when Monsieur de Clagny had
left her. And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was becoming
a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a pleasure.

The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made
it no easier to play. When he wanted to go out after dinner he would
perform the tenderest little farces of affection, and address Dinah in
words full of devotion; he would take her by the chain, and when he had
bruised her with it, even while he hurt her, the lordly ingrate would
say, "Did I wound you?"

These false caresses and deceptions had degrading consequences for
Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love. The mother, alas, gave
way to the mistress with shameful readiness. She felt herself a mere
plaything in the man's hands, and at last she confessed to herself:

"Well, then, I will be his plaything!" finding joy in it--the rapture of
damnation.

When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living in
solitude, she felt her courage fail. She preferred the anticipated and
inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the joys,
which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the midst of
remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a _No_ persuaded to
be _Yes_. At every moment she seemed to come across the pool of bitter
water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish than the traveler
would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince's table.

When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight:

"Will he come home, or will he not?" she was not alive again till she
heard the familiar sound of Lousteau's boots, and his well-known ring at
the bell.

She would often try to restrain him by giving him pleasure; she would
hope to be a match for her rivals, and leave them no hold on that
agitated heart. How many times a day would she rehearse the tragedy of
_Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne_, saying to herself, "To-morrow we part."
And how often would a word, a look, a kiss full of apparently artless
feeling, bring her back to the depths of her love!

It was terrible. More than once had she meditated suicide as she paced
the little town garden where a few pale flowers bloomed. In fact, she
had not yet exhausted the vast treasure of devotion and love which a
loving woman bears in her heart.

The romance of _Adolphe_ was her Bible, her study, for above all else
she would not be an Ellenore. She allowed herself no tears, she a