Page 519 - swanns-way

law of two Archbishops.’
‘I am ashamed to confess that I am not in the least
shocked,’ said the Princesse des Laumes.
‘I know he’s a converted Jew, and all that, and his par-
ents and grandparents before him. But they do say that the
converted ones are worse about their religion than the prac-
tising ones, that it’s all just a pretence; is that true, d’you
think?’
‘I can throw no light at all on the matter.’
The pianist, who was ‘down’ to play two pieces by
Chopin, after finishing the Prelude had at once attacked a
Polonaise. But once Mme. de Gallardon had informed her
cousin that Swann was in the room, Chopin himself might
have risen from the grave and played all his works in turn
without Mme. des Laumes’s paying him the slightest atten-
tion. She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the
human race in which the untiring curiosity which the other
half feels about the people whom it does not know is re-
placed by an unfailing interest in the people whom it does.
As with many women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the
presence, in any room in which she might find herself, of
another member of her set, even although she had nothing
in particular to say to him, would occupy her mind to the
exclusion of every other consideration. From that moment,
in the hope that Swann would catch sight of her, the Prin-
cess could do nothing but (like a tame white mouse when
a lump of sugar is put down before its nose and then tak-
en away) turn her face, in which were crowded a thousand
signs of intimate connivance, none of them with the least

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