year as a bachelor, now spend six thousand, including rates and
repairs, and this is rather too much in relation to the nature of our
property. A winegrower is never sure of what his expenses may be--the
making, the duty, the casks--while the returns depend on a scorching
day or a sudden frost. Small owners, like us, whose income is far from
being fixed, must base their estimates on their minimum, for they have
no means of making up a deficit or a loss. What would become of us if
a wine merchant became bankrupt? In my opinion, promissory notes are
so many cabbage-leaves. To live as we are living, we ought always to
have a year's income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of
our returns."

Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it;
Dinah flung herself against a will of iron padded round with
gentleness. She tried to fill the little man's soul with jealousy and
alarms, but it was stockaded with insolent confidence. He left Dinah,
when he went to Paris, with all the conviction of Medor in Angelique's
fidelity. When she affected cold disdain, to nettle this changeling by
the scorn a courtesan sometimes shows to her "protector," and which
acts on him with the certainty of the screw of a winepress, Monsieur
de la Baudraye gazed at his wife with fixed eyes, like those of a cat
which, in the midst of domestic broils, waits till a blow is
threatened before stirring from its place. The strange, speechless
uneasiness that was perceptible under his mute indifference almost
terrified the young wife of twenty; she could not at first understand
the selfish quiescence of this man, who might be compared to a cracked
pot, and who, in order to live, regulated his existence with the
unchangeable regularity which a clockmaker requires of a clock. So the
little man always evaded his wife, while she always hit out, as it
were, ten feet above his head.