ingly, as if to have some revenge on marriage, wherein her tastes
were so little consulted? But if in the country the husbands are
inferior beings, the bachelors are no less so. When a provincial wife
commits her "little sin," she falls in love with some so-called handsome
native, some indigenous dandy, a youth who wears gloves and is supposed
to ride well; but she knows at the bottom of her soul that her fancy
is in pursuit of the commonplace, more or less well dressed. Dinah was
preserved from this danger by the idea impressed upon her of her own
superiority. Even if she had not been as carefully guarded in her early
married life as she was by her mother, whose presence never weighed upon
her till the day when she wanted to be rid of it, her pride, and her
high sense of her own destinies, would have protected her. Flattered as
she was to find herself surrounded by admirers, she saw no lover
among them. No man here realized the poetical ideal which she and Anna
Grossetete had been wont to sketch. When, stirred by the involuntary
temptations suggested by the homage she received, she asked herself, "If
I had to make a choice, who should it be?" she owned to a preference for
Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, a gentleman of good family, whose appearance
and manners she liked, but whose cold nature, selfishness, and narrow
ambition, never rising above a prefecture and a good marriage, repelled
her. At a word from his family, who were alarmed lest he should be
killed for an intrigue, the Vicomte had already deserted a woman he had
loved in the town where he previously had been Sous-prefet.

Monsieur de Clagny, on the other hand, the only man whose mind appealed
to hers, whose ambition was founded on love, and who knew what love
means, Dinah thought perfectly odious. When Dinah saw herself condemned
to six years' residence at Sancerre she was on the point of accepting
the devotion of Monsieur le Vicomte de Chargeboeuf; but he was appointed
to a prefecture and left the district. To Monsieur de Clagny's great
satisfaction, the new Sous-prefet was a married man whose wife made
friends with Dinah. The lawyer had now no rival to fear but Monsieur
Gravier. Now Monsieur Gravier was the typical man of forty of whom women
make use while they laugh at him, whose hopes they intentionally and
remorselessly encourage, as we are kind to a beast of burden. In six
years, among all the men who were introduced to her from twenty leagues
round, there was