Ten days after the evening at the theatre when they had met, Monsieur de Clagny came to call at four o’clock, after coming out of court, and found Madame de la Baudraye making a little cap.  The sight of this proud and ambitious woman, whose mind was so accomplished, and who had queened it so well at the Chateau d’Anzy, now condescending to household cares and sewing for the coming infant, moved the poor lawyer, who had just left the bench.  And as he saw the pricks on one of the taper fingers he had so often kissed, he understood that Madame de la Baudraye was not merely playing at this maternal task.

In the course of this first interview the magistrate saw to the depths of Dinah’s soul.  This perspicacity in a man so much in love was a superhuman effort.  He saw that Didine meant to be the journalist’s guardian spirit and lead him into a nobler road; she had seen that the difficulties of his practical life were due to some moral defects.  Between two beings united by love—­in one so genuine, and in the other so well feigned—­more than one confidence had been exchanged in the course of four months.  Notwithstanding the care with which Etienne wrapped up his true self, a word now and then had not failed to enlighten Dinah as to the previous life of a man whose talents were so hampered by poverty, so perverted by bad examples, so thwarted by obstacles beyond his courage to surmount.  “He will be a greater man if life is easy to him,” said she to herself.  And she strove to make him happy, to give him the sense of a sheltered home by dint of such economy and method as are familiar to provincial folks.  Thus Dinah became a housekeeper, as she had become a poet, by the soaring of her soul towards the heights.

“His happiness will be my absolution.”

These words, wrung from Madame de la Baudraye by her friend the lawyer, accounted for the existing state of things.  The publicity of his triumph, flaunted by Etienne on the evening of the first performance, had very plainly shown the lawyer what Lousteau’s purpose was.  To Etienne, Madame de la Baudraye was, to use his own phrase, “a fine feather in his cap.”  Far from preferring the joys of a shy and mysterious passion, of hiding such exquisite happiness from the eyes of the world, he found a vulgar satisfaction in displaying the first woman of respectability who had ever honored him with her affection.

The Judge, however, was for some time deceived by the attentions which any man would lavish on any woman in Madame de la Baudraye’s situation, and Lousteau made them doubly charming by the ingratiating ways characteristic of men whose manners are naturally attractive.  There are, in fact, men who have something of the monkey in them by nature, and to whom the assumption of the most engaging forms of sentiment is so easy that the actor is not detected; and Lousteau’s natural gifts had been fully developed on the stage on which he had hitherto figured.