Thus none of Dinah’s choicest faculties had a chance of developing; she swallowed many insults to her pride, which was constantly suffering under the husband who so calmly walked the stage as supernumerary in the drama of her life.  Compelled to bury her wealth of love, she showed only the surface to the world.  Now and then she would try to rouse herself, try to form some manly resolution; but she was kept in leading strings by the need for money.  And so, slowly and in spite of the ambitious protests and grievous recriminations of her own mind, she underwent the provincial metamorphosis here described.  Each day took with it a fragment of her spirited determination.  She had laid down a rule for the care of her person, which she gradually departed from.  Though at first she kept up with the fashions and the little novelties of elegant life, she was obliged to limit her purchases by the amount of her allowance.  Instead of six hats, caps, or gowns, she resigned herself to one gown each season.  She was so much admired in a certain bonnet that she made it do duty for two seasons.  So it was in everything.

Not unfrequently her artistic sense led her to sacrifice the requirements of her person to secure some bit of Gothic furniture.  By the seventh year she had come so low as to think it convenient to have her morning dresses made at home by the best needlewoman in the neighborhood; and her mother, her husband, and her friends pronounced her charming in these inexpensive costumes which did credit to her taste.  Her ideas were imitated!  As she had no standard of comparison, Dinah fell into the snares that surround the provincial woman.  If a Parisian woman’s hips are too narrow or too full, her inventive wit and the desire to please help to find some heroic remedy; if she has some defect, some ugly spot, or small disfigurement, she is capable of making it an adornment; this is often seen; but the provincial woman —­never!  If her waist is too short and her figure ill balanced, well, she makes up her mind to the worst, and her adorers—­or they do not adore her—­must take her as she is, while the Parisian always insists on being taken for what she is not.  Hence the preposterous bustles, the audacious flatness, the ridiculous fulness, the hideous outlines ingeniously displayed, to which a whole town will become accustomed, but which are so astounding when a provincial woman makes her appearance in Paris or among Parisians.  Dinah, who was extremely slim, showed it off to excess, and never knew a dull moment when it became ridiculous; when, reduced by the dull weariness of her life, she looked like a skeleton in clothes; and her friends, seeing her every day, did not observe the gradual change in her appearance.