ed
to undergo the warning which Nature gives to all her creatures--pain.

Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their
characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman
exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way
to them. In Mademoiselle Gamard this sentiment had degenerated into
despotism, but a despotism that could only exercise itself on little
things. For instance (among a hundred other examples), the basket of
counters placed on the card-table for the Abbe Birotteau was to stand
exactly where she placed it; and the abbe annoyed her terribly by
moving it, which he did nearly every evening. How is this sensitiveness
stupidly spent on nothings to be accounted for? what is the object of
it? No one could have told in this case; Mademoiselle Gamard herself
knew no reason for it. The vicar, though a sheep by nature, did not
like, any more than other sheep, to feel the crook too often, especially
when it bristled with spikes. Not seeking to explain to himself the
patience of the Abbe Troubert, Birotteau simply withdrew from the
happiness which Mademoiselle Gamard believed that she seasoned to his
liking,--for she regarded happiness as a thing to be made, like her
preserves. But the luckless abbe made the break in a clumsy way, the
natural way of his own naive character, and it was not carried out
without much nagging and sharp-shooting, which the Abbe Birotteau
endeavored to bear as if he did not feel them.

By the end of the first year of his sojourn under Mademoiselle Gamard's
roof the vicar had resumed his former habits; spending two evenings a
week with Madame de Listomere, three with Mademoiselle Salomon, and
the other two with Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottiere. These ladies
belonged to the aristocratic circles of Tourainean society, to which
Mademoiselle Gamard was not admitted. Therefore the abbe's abandonment
was the more insulting, because it made her feel her want of social
value; all choice implies contempt for the thing rejected.

"Monsieur Birotteau does not find us agreeable enough," said the Abbe
Troubert to Mademoiselle Gamard's friends when she was forced to tell
them that her "evenings" must be given up. "He is a man of the world,
and a good liver! He wants fashion, luxury, witty conversation, and the
scandals of the town."

These words of course obliged Mademoiselle Gamard to defend herself at
Birotteau's expense.

"He is not muc