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By Root 1592 0

of colour, he would have specially made for his wife, at fabulous prices, the sunshades, hats and coats whose charm he had taught Albertine to appreciate and which a person wanting in taste would no more have noticed than I had. Apart from this, Albertine, who had done a little painting, though without, she confessed, having any “gift” for it, felt a boundless admiration for Elstir, and, thanks to his precept and example, showed a judgment of pictures which was in marked contrast to her enthusiasm for Cavalleria Rusticana. The truth was that, though as yet it was hardly apparent, she was highly intelligent, and that in the things that she said the stupidity was not her own but that of her environment and her age. Elstir’s had been a good but only a partial influence. All the branches of her intelligence had not reached the same stage of development. Her taste in pictures had almost caught up with her taste in clothes and all forms of elegance, but had not been followed by her taste in music, which was still a long way behind.

Albertine might know all about the Ambresacs; but as he who can achieve great things is not necessarily capable of small, I did not find her, after I had greeted those young ladies, any more disposed to make me known to her friends. “It’s very good of you to attach importance to them. You shouldn’t take any notice of them; they don’t count. What on earth can a lot of kids like them mean to a man like you? Now Andrée, I must say, is remarkably clever. She’s a good girl, though perfectly weird at times, but the others are really dreadfully stupid.”

When I had left Albertine, I felt suddenly a keen regret that Saint-Loup should have concealed his engagement from me and that he should be doing anything so improper as to choose a wife before breaking with his mistress. And then, some days later, I met Andrée, and as she went on talking to me for some time I seized the opportunity to tell her that I would very much like to see her again next day; but she replied that this was impossible, because her mother was not at all well and she did not want to leave her alone. Two days later I went to see Elstir, who told me that Andrée had taken a great liking to me. When I protested that it was I who had taken a liking to her from the start, and had asked her to meet me again next day but she couldn’t, “Yes, I know, she told me all about that,” was his reply, “she was very sorry, but she had promised to go for a picnic somewhere miles from here. They were to drive over in a break, and it was too late for her to get out of it.” Although this falsehood was of no real significance since Andrée knew me so slightly, I ought not to have continued to seek the company of a person who was capable of it. For what people have once done they will go on doing indefinitely, and if you go every year to see a friend who, the first few times, was unable to keep an appointment with you, or was in bed with a chill, you will find him in bed with another chill which he has just caught, you will miss him again at another meeting-place where he has failed to appear, for a single and unalterable reason in place of which he supposes himself to have various reasons, according to the circumstances.

One morning, not long after Andrée had told me that she would be obliged to stay beside her mother, I was taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on the beach tossing up and catching again at the end of a string a weird object which gave her a look of Giotto’s “Idolatry”; it was called, as it happened, a “diabolo,” and has so fallen into disuse now that, when they come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the commentators of future generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be in front of the allegorical figures in the Arena Chapel, what it is that she is holding. A moment later their friend with the penurious and hard appearance, the one who on that first day had sneered so malevolently: “I do feel sorry for him, poor old boy,” when she saw the old gentleman’s head brushed by the flying feet of Andrée, came up to Albertine