reaction that I felt I could see, where the extent of that mysterious life ceased, a fringe of effervescence outline its frontiers—in the circumference of the circle traced on the carpet by the balloon of her blue pekin skirt, and in the bright eyes of the Duchess at the point of intersection of the preoccupations, the memories, the incomprehensible, scornful, amused and curious thoughts which filled them from within and the outside images that were reflected on their surface. Perhaps I should have been not quite so deeply stirred had I met her at Mme de Villeparisis’s at an evening party, instead of seeing her thus at one of the Marquise’s “at homes,” at one of those tea-parties which are for women no more than a brief halt in the course of their afternoon’s outing, when, keeping on the hats in which they have been doing their shopping, they waft into a succession of salons the quality of the fresh air outside, and offer a better view of Paris in the late afternoon than do the tall open windows through which one can hear the rumble of victorias: Mme de Guermantes wore a straw hat trimmed with cornflowers, and what they recalled to me was not the sunlight of bygone years among the tilled fields round Combray where I had so often gathered them on the slope adjoining the Tansonville hedge, but the smell and the dust of twilight as they had been an hour ago when Mme de Guermantes had walked through them in the Rue de la Paix. With a smiling, disdainful, absent-minded air, and a pout on her pursed lips, she was tracing circles on the carpet with the point of her sunshade, as with the extreme tip of an antenna of her mysterious life; then, with that indifferent attention which begins by eliminating every point of contact between oneself and what one is considering, her gaze fastened upon each of us in turn, then inspected the settees and chairs, but softened now by that human sympathy which is aroused by the presence, however insignificant, of a thing one knows, a thing that is almost a person: these pieces of furniture were not like us, they belonged vaguely to her world, they were bound up with the life of her aunt; then from a Beauvais chair her gaze was carried back to the person sitting on it, and thereupon resumed the same air of perspicacity and that same disapproval which the respect that Mme de Guermantes felt for her aunt would have prevented her from expressing in words, but which she would have felt had she noticed on the chairs, instead of our presence, that of a spot of grease or a layer of dust.
The excellent writer G——entered the room, having come to pay a call on Mme de Villeparisis which he regarded as a tiresome duty. The Duchess, although delighted to see him again, gave him no sign of welcome, but instinctively he made straight for her, the charm that she possessed, her tact, her simplicity making him look upon her as a woman of intelligence. He was bound, in any case, in common politeness to go and talk to her, for, since he was a pleasant and distinguished man, Mme de Guermantes frequently invited him to lunch even when her husband and herself were alone, or, in the autumn, took advantage of this intimacy to have him to dinner occasionally at Guermantes with royal personages who were curious to meet him. For the Duchess liked to entertain certain eminent men, on condition always that they were bachelors, a condition which, even when married, they invariably fulfilled for her, for since their wives, who were always more or less common, would have been a blot on a salon in which there were never any but the most fashionable beauties of Paris, it was always without them that their husbands were invited; and the Duke, to forestall any hurt feelings, would explain to these involuntary widowers that the Duchess never had women in the house, could not endure feminine company, almost as though this had been under doctor’s orders, and as he might have said that she could not stay in a room in which there were smells, or eat over-salted food, or travel with her back to the engine, or wear stays. It was true that