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.

Dinah's fits of fury when she saw herself condemned never to escape
from La Baudraye and Sancerre are more easily imagined than described
--she who had dreamed of handling a fortune and managing the dwarf
whom she, the giant, had at first humored in order to command. In the
hope of some day making her appearance on the greater stage of Paris,
she accepted the vulgar incense of her attendant knights with a view
to seeing Monsieur de la Baudraye's name drawn from the electoral urn;
for she supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice
from Paris, each time a step higher on the social ladder. But when she
struck on the man's heart, it was as though she had tapped on marble!