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The dancer turned his head towards her, and his human person appeared beneath the sylph that he was endeavouring to be, the clear grey jelly of his eyes trembled and sparkled between eyelashes stiff with paint, and a smile extended the corners of his mouth in a face plastered with rouge; then, to amuse the young woman, like a singer who obligingly hums the tune of the song in which we have told her that we admired her singing, he began to repeat the movement of his hands, counterfeiting himself with the subtlety of a mime and the good humour of a child.

“Oh, it’s too lovely, the way he mimics himself,” cried Rachel, clapping her hands.

“I implore you, my dearest girl,” Saint-Loup broke in, in a tone of utter misery, “don’t make an exhibition of yourself, I can’t stand it. I swear if you say another word I won’t go with you to your room, I shall walk straight out. Come on, don’t be nasty . . . You oughtn’t to stand about in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll make you ill,” he added, turning to me, with the solicitude he had shown for me in our Balbec days.

“Oh! what bliss it would be if you did go.”

“I warn you, if I do, I shan’t come back.”

“That’s more than I should dare to hope.”

“Look here, I promised you the necklace if you behaved nicely to me, but since you treat me like this . . .”

“Ah! that doesn’t surprise me in the least. You gave me a promise, but I ought to have known you’d never keep it. You want the whole world to know you’re made of money, but I’m not self-interested and money-grubbing like you. You can keep your blasted necklace; I know someone else who’ll give it to me.”

“No one else can possibly give it to you. I’ve told Boucheron he’s to keep it for me, and I have his promise not to sell it to anyone else.”

“So that’s it! You wanted to blackmail me, so you took all your precautions in advance. It’s just what they say: Marsantes, Mater Semita, it smells of the race,” retorted Rachel, quoting an etymology which was founded on a wild misinterpretation, for Semita means “path” and not “Semite,” but one which the Nationalists applied to Saint-Loup on account of the Dreyfusard views for which, as it happened, he was indebted to the actress. (She was less justified than anyone in applying the appellation of Jewess to Mme de Marsantes, in whom the ethnologists of society could succeed in finding no trace of Jewishness apart from her kinship with the Lévy-Mirepoix family.) “But this isn’t the last of it, I can tell you. An agreement like that isn’t binding. You’ve behaved treacherously towards me. Boucheron shall be told of it and he’ll be paid twice as much for his necklace. You’ll hear from me before long, don’t you worry.”

Robert was in the right a hundred times over. But circumstances are always so entangled that the man who is in the right a hundred times may have been once in the wrong. (Lord Derby himself acknowledges that England does not always seem right vis-à-vis Ireland.) And I could not help recalling that unpleasant and yet quite innocent remark he had made at Balbec: “In that way I keep a hold over her.”

“You don’t understand what I mean about the necklace. I made no formal promise. Once you start doing everything you possibly can to make me leave you, it’s only natural, surely, that I shouldn’t give it to you. I fail to understand what treachery you can see in that, or in what way I’m supposed to be self-interested. You can’t seriously maintain that I brag about my money, I’m always telling you that I’m only a poor devil without a cent to my name. It’s foolish of you to take it that way, my sweet. How am I self-interested? You know very well that my one interest in life is you.”

“Yes, yes, please go on,” she retorted ironically, with the sweeping gesture of a barber wielding his razor.11 And turning towards the dancer:

“Isn’t he too wonderful with his hands! I couldn’t do the things he’s doing there, even though I’m a woman.” She went closer to him and, pointing to Robert’s