Page 105 - swanns-way

allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation
and at Franchise’s urgent request, and who in the course of
their visit had shewn how unworthy they were of the hon-
our which had been done them by venturing a timid: ‘Don’t
you think that if you were just to stir out a little on really fine
days...?’ or who, on the other hand, when she said to them:
‘I am very low, very low; nearing the end, dear friends!’ had
replied: ‘Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you
may last a while yet”; each party alike might be certain that
her doors would never open to them again. And if Françoise
was amused by the look of consternation on my aunt’s face
whenever she saw, from her bed, any of these people in the
Rue du Saint-Esprit, who looked as if they were coming to
see her, or heard her own door-bell ring, she would laugh
far more heartily, as at a clever trick, at my aunt’s devices
(which never failed) for having them sent away, and at their
look of discomfiture when they had to turn back without
having seen her; and would be filled with secret admiration
for her mistress, whom she felt to be superior to all these
other people, inasmuch as she could and did contrive not to
see them. In short, my aunt stipulated, at one and the same
time, that whoever came to see her must approve of her way
of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure
her of an ultimate recovery.
In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her
twenty times in a minute: ‘The end is come at last, my poor
Eulalie!’, twenty times Eulalie would retort with: ‘Knowing
your illness as you do, Mme. Octave, you will live to be a
hundred, as Mme. Sazerin said to me only yesterday.’ For

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