“Well, whatever I have, I keep out of the reach of vulgar impertinence. I should be very sorry to make my feelings a target for insolence and bad breeding,” replied Aline pertly. This was the simple truth. Her feelings were out of the reach of such petty shafts; they were cased in cheerfulness and common sense, and a nobler sort of pride than that in which Mme. de Chanoir considered her sister wanting. If, however, the obus was frequently fatal to Mlle. de Lemaque’s social standing, on the other hand it occasionally did her good service; but of this later. Its present character was that of an explosive bomb which she carried in her pocket, and _lancéd_ with infinite gusto on every available opportunity. On Saturday evening the sisters were “at home.” These little soirées were the great event of their quiet lives. All the episodes and anecdotes of the week were treasured up for that evening, when the intimes came to see them and converse and sip a glass of cold _eau sucrée_ in summer, and a cup of hot ditto in winter (but then it was called tea) by the light of a small lamp with a green shade. There was no attempt at entertainment or finery of any kind, except that Mme. Cléry, instead of going home as soon as the dinner things were washed up, stayed to open the door. It was a remnant of the sort of society that used to exist in French families some thirty years ago, when conversation was cultivated as the primary accomplishment of men and women, and when they met regularly to exercise themselves in the difficult and delightful art. It was not reserved to the well‐born exclusively to talk well and brilliantly in those days, when the most coveted encomium that could be passed on any one was, “He talks well.” All classes vied for it; every circle had its centre of conversation. The _fauteuil de l’aïeule_ and the salon of the _femme d’esprit_, each had its audience, attended as assiduously, and perhaps enjoyed quite as much, as the vaudevilles and ambigus that have since drawn away the bourgeois from the one and the man of fashion from the other. Besides its usual habitués for conversation, every circle had one habitué who was looked upon as the friend of the family, and tacitly took precedence of all the others. The friend of the family at No. 13 was a certain professor of the Sorbonne named M. Dalibouze. He was somewhere on the sunny side of fifty, a bald, pompous little man who wore spectacles, took snuff, and laid down the law; very prosy and very estimable, a model professor. He had never married, but it was the dream of his life to marry. He had meditated on marriage for the last thirty years, and of course knew more about it than any man who had been married double that time. He was never so eloquent or so emphatic as when dilating on the joys and duties of domestic life; no matter how tired he was with study and scientific researches, how disappointed in the result of some cherished