himself or herself as an inferior; and he regarded as one of the basest, as well as subtlest poisons of snobbishness, the habit of telling others to do for one the menial, personal things which can be done with dignity only by oneself.  Once, in Paris—­after Besancon—­Janet spoke of some of her aristocratic acquaintances on the other side as “acting as if they had always been used to everything; so different from even the best people at home.”  Dory remembered how Adelaide promptly took her up, gave instance after instance in proof that European aristocrats were in fact as vulgar in their satisfaction in servility as were the newest of the newly aristocratic at home, but simply had a different way of showing it.  “A more vulgar way,” she said, Janet unable to refute her.  “Yes, far more vulgar, Jen, because deliberately concealed; just as vanity that swells in secret is far worse than frank, childish conceit.”

And now—­These vanities of hers, sprung from the old roots which in Paris she had been eager to kill and he was hoping were about dead, sprung in vigor and spreading in weedy exuberance!  He often looked at her in sad wonder when she was unconscious of it.  “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.  In the city even the narrowest are compelled to at least an occasional glimpse of wider horizons; but in the small town only the vigilant and resolute ever get so much as a momentary point of view.  She told herself, in angry attempt at self-excuse, that he ought to take her in hand, ought to snatch her away from that which she had not the courage to give up of herself.  Yet she knew she would hate him should he try to do it.  She assumed that was the reason he didn’t; and it was part of the reason, but a lesser part than his unacknowledged, furtive fear of what he might discover as to his own feelings toward her, were there just then a casting up and balancing of their confused accounts with each other.

Both were relieved, as at a crisis postponed, when it became necessary for him to go abroad again immediately.  “I don’t see how you can leave,” said he, thus intentionally sparing her a painful effort in saying what at once came into the mind of each.