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ual observances, was subjected to daily profanation, for the
friend replied in words which were evidently a liturgical re-
sponse: ‘Let him stay there. He can’t trouble us any longer.
D’you think he’d start whining, d’you think he’d pack you
out of the house if he could see you now, with the window
open, the ugly old monkey?’
To which Mlle. Vinteuil replied, ‘Oh, please!’—a gentle
reproach which testified to the genuine goodness of her na-
ture, not that it was prompted by any resentment at hearing
her father spoken of in this fashion (for that was evidently
a feeling which she had trained herself, by a long course of
sophistries, to keep in close subjection at such moments),
but rather because it was the bridle which, so as to avoid all
appearance of egotism, she herself used to curb the gratifi-
cation which her friend was attempting to procure for her. It
may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with
which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this
tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and
generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive
form of that criminal attitude towards life which she was
endeavouring to adopt. But she could not resist the attrac-
tion of being treated with affection by a woman who had
just shewn herself so implacable towards the defenceless
dead; she sprang on to the knees of her friend and held out
a chaste brow to be kissed; precisely as a daughter would
have done to her mother, feeling with exquisite joy that they
would thus, between them, inflict the last turn of the screw
of cruelty, in robbing M. Vinteuil, as though they were actu-
ally rifling his tomb, of the sacred rights of fatherhood. Her

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