st disaster,
mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too prone to
pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to hate. What
would become of him without me? I hindered his marriage; he has no
prospects. His talent would perish in privations."

"Oh, my Dinah!" Madame Piedefer had exclaimed, "what a hell you live in!
What is the feeling that gives you strength enough to persist?"

"I will be a mother to him!" she had replied.

There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision
till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor. We accept
compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to play
prosecutor. Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had been
torturing Dinah.

"To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to
preserve her power," said she to herself 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 th