were so many stabs to Dinah, though she perfectly understood that
Anna's advantages all lay on the surface, while her own were for ever
buried.

When Anna had left, Madame de la Baudraye, by this time
two-and-twenty, fell into the depths of despair.

"What is it that ails you?" asked Monsieur de Clagny, seeing her so
dejected.

"Anna," said she, "has learned to live, while I have been learning to
endure."

A tragi-comedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye's
house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her
successive transformations--a drama to which no one but Monsieur de
Clagny and the Abbe Duret ever knew the clue, when Dinah in sheer
idleness, or perhaps sheer vanity, revealed the secret of her
anonymous fame.

Though a mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French
literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be
one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of
narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which
may excuse, though it cannot absolve Dinah, it is necessary to give an
analysis of a poem which was the outcome of her deep despair.

Her patience and her resignation alike broken by the departure of the
Vicomte de Chargeboeuf, Dinah took the worthy Abbe's advice to exhale
her evil thoughts in verse--a proceeding which perhaps accounts for