This shade of deference also disturbed Pierre.

He had suffered so painfully three years before from the mortification to which his wife had subjected him that he now protected himself from the danger of its repetition, first by not being a husband to his wife, and secondly by not allowing himself to suspect.

"No, now that she has become a bluestocking she has finally renounced her former infatuations," he told himself.

" There has never been an instance of a bluestocking being carried away by affairs of the heart"--a statement which, though gathered from an unknown source, he believed implicitly.