"What _is_ the matter ?" he would repeat.

"She is farther away than in Paris, where the temptation to this sort of nonsense was at least plausible." And he grew silent with her and shut himself in alone during the evening hours which he could not spend at the university.

She knew why, knew also that he was right, ceased to bore herself and irritate him with attempts to make the Villa d'Orsay the social center of the university.

But she continued to waste her days in the inane pastimes of Saint X's fashionable world, though ashamed of herself and disgusted with her mode of life.

For snobbishness is essentially a provincial vice, due full as much to narrowness as to ignorance; and, thus, it is most potent in the small "set" in the small town.