“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 of me?”
“But we do not live for the world!” cried she, raising Etienne and making him sit by her. “Besides, we shall be married some day—we have the risks of a sea voyage——”
“I never thought of that,” said Lousteau simply; and he added to himself, “Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back again.”
From that day forth Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights, could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris. Lousteau was so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la Baudraye.
“Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from Dinah! But no one ever can!” said he. “She loves me enough to throw herself out of the window if I told her.”
The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against Dinah’s jealousy when he accepted an invitation. And then he was shamelessly unfaithful. Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at seeing Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have been so rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her original ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to tell her—“You are betrayed,” and she only replied, “I know it.”
The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.
Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a word.