"You're not going to tell that story here," announced his wife, with the calm accent of mastery, which once in a while slipped from her in an unguarded moment. He went through the form of protesting, claiming that it was nothing--nowadays people were not prudish--but his wife settled the matter by taking the floor herself, turning to the girls, and saying laughingly, "That uncle of my husband's--he was one of the old school--out of a Balzac novel of the provinces. There aren't any more like him. It was through a to-the-death quarrel with him that Auguste and I met each other." This slid her easily along into talk of early days, a quarter of a century before, when she was in one of the first lycees, at the time when lay-school teachers were an abomination and a hissing to the decent church-going bourgeois. Dryly, with the inimitable terse picturesqueness of phrase which made her famous as a talker with people who demanded a great deal more than youthful high spirits, she took them back with her, twenty years, into the remote provincial city where she had encountered every narrowness possible to bigotry and reaction, and had wound it all around her little finger. Through her highly amusing recital of how she had played on the prejudices of those provincials, how adroitly she had employed against them their very vices, their jealousy and suspicion of each other, their grasping avarice, their utter dumb-beast ignorance of what modern education meant, through all this played, like a little sulphurous flame, her acrid scorn and contempt for them, her vitriolic satisfaction in having cheated and beaten them, in having turned them inside out and made fools of them, without their ever once suspecting it. Her husband's admiration of her powers was boundless. "That is now one of the most prosperous and successful lycees in eastern France," he told the girls, "and every year they have a big dinner with my wife as guest of honor, with speeches and things, and somebody lays a wreath on her as though she were a statue. Quite a joke, hein?" "Well, that must be an enjoyable occasion indeed," thought Marise, seeing the scene as though she had been there; the simple-minded provincials, trying simple-mindedly to honor the founder of their lycee; Mme. Vallery sitting at the right hand of their Mayor, with her mild air of deprecating the too-great honor done her--and her little sulphurous flame of vitriolic contempt playing over the convolutions of her brain. "Yes, it is a very pretty world we live in," thought Marise, laughing heartily at Mme. Vallery's satirical imitation of one of the clumsy speeches made in her honor on the last occasion. * * * * * She thought it still a prettier world, when in the cab as she was accompanying Eugenia back to Auteuil, Eugenia said, radiating satisfaction, "I'm to have my part in the fete-de-charite, too!" "You _are_!" said Marise, "what are you going to do?"