“Oh! enough!” cried he. “No more copy! Your dissertation is unnecessary, since you can justify yourself by merely saying—‘I have ceased to love!’”
“What!” she exclaimed in bewilderment. “Is it I who have ceased to love?”
“Certainly. You have calculated that I gave you more trouble, more vexation than pleasure, and you desert your partner—”
“I desert!——” cried she, clasping her hands.
“Have not you yourself just said ‘Never’?”
“Well, then, yes! Never,” she repeated vehemently.
This final Never, spoken in the fear of falling once more under Lousteau’s influence, was interpreted by him as the death-warrant of his power, since Dinah remained insensible to his sarcastic scorn.
The journalist could not suppress a tear. He was losing a sincere and unbounded affection. He had found in Dinah the gentlest La Valliere, the most delightful Pompadour that any egoist short of a king could hope for; and, like a boy who has discovered that by dint of tormenting a cockchafer he has killed it, Lousteau shed a tear.
Madame de la Baudraye rushed out of the private room where they had been dining, paid the bill, and fled home to the Rue de l’Arcade, scolding herself and thinking herself a brute.
Dinah, who had made her house a model of comfort, now metamorphosed herself. This double metamorphosis cost thirty thousand francs more than her husband had anticipated.