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The Duke fastened on his wife a slow gaze of feigned stupefaction. Mme de Guermantes began to laugh. Gradually the Princess became aware of their pantomime.

“But . . . do you mean to say . . . you don’t agree with me?” she stammered with growing uneasiness.

“Really, Ma’am, it’s too good of you to pay any attention to Basin’s faces. Now, Basin, you’re not to hint nasty things about our cousins.”

“Does he think she’s too malicious?” inquired the Princess briskly.

“Oh, dear me, no!” replied the Duchess. “I don’t know who told Your Highness that she was malicious. On the contrary, she’s an excellent creature who never spoke ill of anyone, or did any harm to anyone.”

“Ah!” sighed Mme de Parme, greatly relieved. “I must say I’d never noticed it either. But I know it’s often difficult not to be a bit malicious when one has a great deal of wit . . .”

“Ah! now that is a quality of which she has even less.”

“Less wit?” asked the stupefied Princess.

“Come now, Oriane,” broke in the Duke in a plaintive tone, casting to right and left of him a glance of amusement, “you heard the Princess tell you that she was a superior woman.”

“But isn’t she?”

“Superior in chest measurement, at any rate.”

“Don’t listen to him, Ma’am, he’s having you on; she’s as stupid as a (h’m) goose,” came in a loud and husky voice from Mme de Guermantes, who, a great deal more “old world” even than the Duke when she wasn’t trying, often deliberately sought to be, but in a manner entirely different from the deliquescent, lace jabot style of her husband and in reality far more subtle, with a sort of almost peasant pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil. “But she’s the best woman in the world. Besides, I don’t really know that one can call it stupidity when it’s carried to such a point as that. I don’t believe I ever met anyone quite like her; she’s a case for a specialist, there’s something pathological about her, she’s a sort of ‘natural’ or cretin or ‘mooncalf,’ like the people you see in melodramas, or in L’Arlésienne. I always ask myself, when she comes here, whether the moment may not have arrived at which her intelligence is going to dawn, which makes me a little nervous always.”

The Princess marvelled at these expressions, but remained astonished by the verdict. “She repeated to me—and so did Mme d’Epinay—your remark about ‘Teaser Augustus.’ It’s delicious,” she put in.

M. de Guermantes explained the joke to me. I wanted to tell him that his brother, who pretended not to know me, was expecting me that very evening at eleven o’clock. But I had not asked Robert whether I might mention this assignation, and as the fact that M. de Charlus had practically fixed it with me himself directly contradicted what he had told the Duchess, I judged it more tactful to say nothing.

“‘Teaser Augustus’ isn’t bad,” said M. de Guermantes, “but Mme d’Heudicourt probably didn’t tell you a far wittier remark Oriane made to her the other day in reply to an invitation to luncheon.”

“Oh, no! Do tell me!”

“Now, Basin, you keep quiet. In the first place, it was a stupid remark, and it will make the Princess think me inferior even to my nitwit of a cousin. Though I don’t know why I should call her my cousin. She’s one of Basin’s cousins. Still, I believe she is related to me in some sort of way.”

“Oh!” cried the Princesse de Parme at the idea that she could possibly think Mme de Guermantes stupid, and protesting desperately that nothing could ever make the Duchess fall from the place she held in her estimation.

“Besides, we’ve already deprived her of the qualities of the mind, and since the remark in question tends to deny certain qualities of the heart, it seems to me inopportune to repeat it.”

“‘Deny her!’ ‘Inopportune!’ How well she expresses herself!” said the Duke with a pretence of irony, to win admiration for the Duchess.

“Now, then, Basin, you’re not to make fun of your wife.”

“I should explain to your Royal Highness,” went on the Duke, “that Oriane’s cousin may be superior, good, stout, anything you like to mention, but she is