“ ‘No, she’s a blue-stocking now. She’s renounced those old affairs for good,’ he said to himself. ‘There’s never been a case of a blue-stocking having any passions of the heart,’ he kept telling himself—a general principle he had picked up somewhere and certainly believed in. But curiously enough the presence of Boris in his wife’s drawing room—and he was nearly always there—had a physical effect on Pierre.”