if the other knew about her party beforehand, raised her eyelids once again in Edith’s direction, as though not to lose sight of a threatening peril, lowering them again briskly so as not to commit herself too far. She intended, on the morning after the party, to write her one of those letters, the complement of the revealing glance, letters which are meant to be subtle but are tantamount to a full and signed confession. For instance: “Dear Edith, I’ve been missing you. I did not really expect you last night” (“How could she have expected me,” Edith would say to herself, “since she never invited me?”) “as I know that you’re not very fond of gatherings of that sort which rather bore you. We should have been greatly honoured, all the same, by your company” (Mme de Mortemart never used the word “honoured,” except in letters in which she attempted to cloak a lie in the semblance of truth). “You know that you are always welcome in our house. In any case you were quite right, as it was a complete failure, like everything that is got up at a moment’s notice.” But already the second furtive glance darted at her had enabled Edith to grasp everything that was concealed by the complicated language of M. de Charlus. This glance was indeed so potent that, after it had struck Mme de Valcourt, the obvious secrecy and intention to conceal that it betrayed rebounded upon a young Peruvian whom Mme de Mortemart intended, on the contrary, to invite. But being of a suspicious nature, seeing all too plainly the mystery that was being made without realising that it was not intended to mystify him, he at once conceived a violent hatred for Mme de Mortemart and vowed to play all sorts of disagreeable hoaxes on her, such as ordering fifty iced coffees to be sent to her house on a day when she was not entertaining, or, on a day when she was, inserting a notice in the papers to the effect that the party was postponed, and publishing mendacious accounts of subsequent parties in which would appear the notorious names of all the people whom for various reasons a hostess does not invite or even allow to be introduced to her.
Mme de Mortemart need not have bothered herself about Mme de Valcourt. M. de Charlus was about to take it upon himself to denature the projected entertainment far more than that lady’s presence would have done. “But, my dear cousin,” she said in response to the remark about “adapting the surroundings,” the meaning of which her momentary state of hyperaesthesia had enabled her to discern, “we shall spare you the least trouble. I undertake to ask Gilbert to arrange everything.”
“Not on any account, and moreover he will not be invited. Nothing will be done except through me. The first thing is to exclude all those who have ears and hear not.”
M. de Charlus’s cousin, who had been reckoning on Morel as an attraction in order to give a party at which she could say that, unlike so many of her kinswomen, she had “had Palamède,” abruptly switched her thoughts from this prestige of M. de Charlus’s to all the people with whom he would get her into trouble if he took it upon himself to do the inviting and excluding. The thought that the Prince de Guermantes (on whose account, partly, she was anxious to exclude Mme de Valcourt, whom he declined to meet) was not to be invited alarmed her. Her eyes assumed an uneasy expression.
“Is this rather bright light bothering you?” inquired M. de Charlus with an apparent seriousness the underlying irony of which she failed to perceive.
“No, not at all. I was thinking of the difficulty, not because of me of course, but because of my family, if Gilbert were to hear that I had given a party without inviting him, when he never has half a dozen people in without …”
“But precisely, we must begin by eliminating the half-dozen people, who would only jabber. I’m afraid that the din of talk has prevented you from realising that it was a question not of doing the honours as a hostess but of conducting the rites appropriate to every true celebration.”
Then, having decided, not that the next person had been kept