This result deeply grieved the Superior Woman, who despaired of Sancerre, and collected the wit of the neighborhood in her own drawing-room. Nevertheless, and in spite of the efforts of Messieurs de Chargeboeuf, Gravier, and de Clagny, of the Abbe Duret and the two chief magistrates, of a young doctor, and a young Assistant Judge--all blind admirers of Dinah’s--there were occasions when, weary of discussion, they allowed themselves an excursion into the domain of agreeable frivolity which constitutes the common basis of worldly conversation. Monsieur Gravier called this “from grave to gay.” The Abbe Duret’s rubber made another pleasing variety on the monologues of the oracle. The three rivals, tired of keeping their minds up to the level of the “high range of discussion”--as they called their conversation--but not daring to confess it, would sometimes turn with ingratiating hints to the old priest. “Monsieur le Cure is dying for his game,” they would say. The wily priest lent himself very readily to the little trick. He protested. “We should lose too much by ceasing to listen to our inspired hostess!” and so he would incite Dinah’s magnanimity to take pity at last on her dear Abbe. This bold manoeuvre, a device of the Sous-prefet’s, was repeated with so much skill that Dinah never suspected her slaves of escaping to the prison yard, so to speak, of the cardtable; and they would leave her one of the younger functionaries to harry. One young landowner, and the dandy of Sancerre, fell away from Dinah’s good graces in consequence of some rash demonstrations. After soliciting the honor of admission to this little circle, where he flattered himself he could snatch the blossom from the constituted authorities who guarded it, he was so unfortunate as to yawn in the middle of an explanation Dinah was favoring him with--for the fourth time, it is true--of the philosophy of Kant. Monsieur de la Thaumassiere, the grandson of the historian of Le Berry, was thenceforth regarded as a man entirely bereft of soul and brains. The three devotees _en titre_ each submitted to these exorbitant demands on their mind and attention, in hope of a crowning triumph, when at last Dinah should become human; for neither of them was so bold as to imagine that Dinah would give up her innocence as a wife till she should have lost all her illusions. In 1826, when she was surrounded by adorers, Dinah completed her twentieth year, and the Abbe Duret kept her in a sort of fervid Catholicism; so her worshipers had to be content to overwhelm her with little attentions and small services, only too happy to be taken for the carpet-knights of this sovereign lady, by strangers admitted to spend an evening or two at La Baudraye. “Madame de la Baudraye is a fruit that must be left to ripen.” This was the opinion of Monsieur Gravier, who was waiting.