m, and
with the help of such connections as her wit and beauty would obtain
for her in Paris. Nais was enchanted by the prospect of such liberty.
M. de Bargeton was of the opinion that he was making a brilliant
marriage, for he expected that in no long while M. de Negrepelisse
would leave him the estates which he was rounding out so lovingly; but
to an unprejudiced spectator it certainly seemed as though the duty of
writing the bridegroom's epitaph might devolve upon his father-in-law.

By this time Mme. de Bargeton was thirty-six years old and her husband
fifty-eight. The disparity in age was the more startling since M. de
Bargeton looked like a man of seventy, whereas his wife looked
scarcely half her age. She could still wear rose-color, and her hair
hanging loose upon her shoulders. Although their income did not exceed
twelve thousand francs, they ranked among the half-dozen largest
fortunes in the old city, merchants and officials excepted; for M. and
Mme. de Bargeton were obliged to live in Angouleme until such time as
Mme. de Bargeton's inheritance should fall in and they could go to
Paris. Meanwhile they were bound to be attentive to old M. de
Negrepelisse (who kept them waiting so long that his son-in-law in
fact predeceased him), and Nais' brilliant intellectual gifts, and the
wealth that lay like undiscovered ore in her nature, profited her
nothing, underwent the transforming operation of Time and changed to
absurdities. For our absurdities spring, in fact, for the most part,
from the good in us, from some faculty or quality abnormally
developed. Pride, untempered by intercourse with the great world
becomes stiff and starched by contact with petty things; in a loftier
moral atmosphere it would have grown to noble magnanimity. Enthusiasm,
that virtue within a virtue, forming the saint, inspiring the devotion
hidden from all eyes and glowing out upon the world in verse, turns to
exaggeration, with the trifles of a narrow existence for its object.
Far away from the centres of light shed by great minds, where the air
is quick with thought, knowledge stands still, taste is corrupted like
stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon the
infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein lies the
secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poison provincial life.
The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the noblest
natures; and in such ways as these, men born to be great, and wom