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, caprice, and taste--to
accept Beyle's definitions. Didine loved him so wholly, that in certain
moments when her critical judgment, just by nature, and constantly
exercised since she had lived in Paris, compelled her to read to the
bottom of Lousteau's soul, sense was still too much for reason, and
suggested excuses.

"And what am I?" she replied. "A woman who has put herself outside the
pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman's honor, why should you not
sacrifice to me some of a man's honor? Do we not live outside the limits
of social conventionality? Why not accept from me what Nathan can accept
from Florine? We will square accounts when we part, and only death can
part us--you know. My happiness is your honor, Etienne, as my constancy
and your happiness are mine. If I fail to make you happy, all is at an
end. If I cause you a pang, condemn me.

"Our debts are paid; we have ten thousand francs a year, and between
us we can certainly make eight thousand francs a year--I will write
theatrical articles.--With fifteen hundred francs a month we shall be as
rich as Rothschild.--Be quite easy. I will have some lovely dresses,
and give you every day some gratified vanity, as on the first night of
Nathan's play--"

"And what about your mother, who goes to Mass every day, and wants to
bring a priest to the house and make you give up this way of life?"

"Every one has a pet vice. You smoke, she preaches at me, poor woman!
But she takes great care of the children, she takes them out, she is
absolutely devoted, and idolizes me. Would you hinder her from crying?"

"What will be thought