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,