Page 517 - swanns-way

Mme. de Gallardon then drew herself up and, chilling
her expression still further, perhaps because she was still
uneasy about the Prince’s health, said to her cousin:
‘Oriane,’ (at once Mme. des Laumes looked with amused
astonishment towards an invisible third, whom she seemed
to call to witness that she had never authorised Mme. de
Gallardon to use her Christian name) ‘I should be so pleased
if you would look in, just for a minute, to-morrow evening,
to hear a quintet, with the clarinet, by Mozart. I should like
to have your opinion of it.’
She seemed not so much to be issuing an invitation as to
be asking favour, and to want the Princess’s opinion of the
Mozart quintet just though it had been a dish invented by a
new cook, whose talent it was most important that an epi-
cure should come to judge.
‘But I know that quintet quite well. I can tell you now—
that I adore it.’
‘You know, my husband isn’t at all well; it’s his liver. He
would like so much to see you,’ Mme. de Gallardon re-
sumed, making it now a corporal work of charity for the
Princess to appear at her party.
The Princess never liked to tell people that she would not
go to their houses. Every day she would write to express her
regret at having been kept away—by the sudden arrival of
her husband’s mother, by an invitation from his brother, by
the Opera, by some excursion to the country—from some
party to which she had never for a moment dreamed of go-
ing. In this way she gave many people the satisfaction of
feeling that she was on intimate terms with them, that she

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