Albertine might know all about the Ambresacs; but as he who can achieve great things is not necessarily capable of small, I did not find her, after I had bowed to those young ladies, any better disposed to make me known to her friends. “It’s too good of you to attach any importance to them. You shouldn’t take any notice of them; they don’t count. What on earth can a lot of kids like them mean to a man like you? Now Andrée, I must say, is remarkably clever. She is a good girl, that, though she is perfectly fantastic at times, but the others are really dreadfully stupid.” When I had left Albertine, I felt suddenly a keen regret that Saint-Loup should have concealed his engagement from me and that he should be doing anything so improper as to choose a wife before breaking with his mistress. And then, shortly afterwards, I met Andrée, and as she went on talking to me for some time I seized the opportunity to tell her that I would very much like to see her again next day, but she replied that this was impossible, because her mother was not at all well, and she would have to stay beside her. The next day but one, when I was at Elstir’s, he told me how greatly Andrée had been attracted by me; on my protesting: “But it was I who was attracted by her from the start; I asked her to meet me again yesterday, but she could not.” “Yes, I know; she told me all about that,” was his reply, “she was very sorry, but she had promised to go to a picnic, somewhere miles from here. They were to drive over in a break, and it was too late for her to get out of it.” Albeit this falsehood (Andrée knowing me so slightly) was of no real importance, I ought not to have continued to seek the company of a person who was capable of uttering it. For what people have once done they will do again indefinitely, and if you go every year to see a friend who, the first time, was not able to meet you at the appointed place, or was in bed with a chill, you will find him in bed with another chill which he has just caught, you will miss him again at another meeting-place at which he has failed to appear, for a single and unalterable reason in place of which he supposes himself to have various reasons, drawn from the circumstances. One morning, not long after Andree’s telling me that she would be obliged to stay beside her mother, I was taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on the beach tossing up and catching again on a cord an oddly shaped implement which gave her a look of Giotto’s ‘Idolatry’; it was called, for that matter, ‘Diabolo,’ and is so fallen into disuse now that, when they come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the critics of future generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be over one of the allegorical figures in the Arena, what it is that she is holding. A moment later their friend with the penurious and harsh appearance, the same one who on that first day had sneered so malevolently: “I do feel sorry for him, poor old man,” when, she saw the old gentleman’s head brushed by the flying feet of Andrée, came up to Albertine with “Good morning,‘m I disturbing you?” She had taken off her hat, for comfort, and her hair, like a strange and fascinating-plant, lay over her brow, displaying all the delicate tracery of its foliation. Albertine, perhaps because she resented seeing the other bare-headed, made-no reply, preserved a frigid silence in spite of which the girl stayed with us, kept apart from myself by Albertine, who arranged at one moment to be-alone with her, at another to walk with me leaving her to follow. I was obliged, to secure an introduction, to ask for it in the girl’s hearing. Then, as Albertine was uttering my name, on the face and in the blue eyes of this girl, whose expression I had thought so cruel when I heard her say: “Poor old man, I do feel so sorry for him,” I saw gather and gleam a cordial, friendly smile, and she held out her hand. Her hair was golden, and not her hair only; for if her cheeks were pink and her eyes blue it was like the still roseate morning sky which sparkles everywhere with dazzling points of gold.
At once kindled by her flame, I said to myself that this was a child who when in love grew shy, that it was for my sake, from love for me that she had remained with us, despite Albertine’s rebuffs, and that she must have rejoiced in the opportunity to confess to me at last, by that smiling, friendly gaze, that she would be as kind to me as she was terrible to other people. Doubtless she had noticed me on the beach, when I still knew nothing of her, and had been thinking of me ever since; perhaps it had been to win my admiration that she mocked at the old gentleman, and because she had not succeeded in getting to know me that on the following days she appeared so morose. From the hotel I had often seen her, in the evenings, walking by herself on the beach. Probably in the hope of meeting me. And now, hindered as much by Albertine’s presence as she would have been by that of the whole band, she had evidently attached herself to us, braving the increasing coldness of her friend’s attitude, only in the hope of outstaying her, of being left alone with me, when she might make an appointment with me for some time when she would find an excuse to slip away without either her family’s or her friends’ knowing that she had gone, and would meet me in some safe place before church or after golf. It was all the more difficult to see her because Andrée had quarrelled with her and now detested her. “I have put up far too long with her terrible dishonesty,” she explained to me, “her baseness; I can’t tell you all the vile insults she has heaped on me. I have stood it all because of the others. But her latest effort was really too much!” And she told me of some foolish thing that this girl had done, which might indeed have injurious consequences to Andrée herself.
But those private words promised me by Gisèle’s confiding eyes for the moment when Albertine should have left us by ourselves, were destined never to be spoken, because after Albertine, stubbornly planted between us, had answered with increasing curtness, and finally had ceased to respond at all to her friend’s remarks, Gisèle at length abandoned the attempt and turned back. I found fault with Albertine for having been so disagreeable. “It will teach her to be more careful how she behaves. She’s not a bad kid, but she’d talk the head off a donkey. She’s no business, either, to go poking her nose into everything. Why should she fasten herself on to us without being asked? In another minute, I’d have told her to go to blazes. Besides I can’t stand her going about with her hair like that; it’s such bad form.” I gazed at Albertine’s cheeks as she spoke, and asked myself what might be the perfume, the taste of them: this time they were not cool, but glowed with a uniform pink, violet-tinted, creamy, like certain roses whose petals have a waxy gloss. I felt a passionate longing for them such as one feels sometimes for a particular flower. “I hadn’t noticed it,” was all that I said. “You stared at her hard enough; anyone would have said you wanted to paint her portrait,” she scolded, not at all softened by the fact that it was at herself that I was now staring so fixedly. “I don’t believe you would care for her, all the same. She’s not in the least a flirt. You like little girls who flirt with you, I know. Anyhow, she won’t have another chance of fastening on to us and being sent about her business; she’s going off to-day to Paris.” “Are the rest of your friends going too?” “No; only she and ‘Miss,’ because she’s got an exam, coming; she’s got to stay at home and swot for it, poor kid. It’s not much fun for her, I don’t mind telling you. Of course, you may be set a good subject, you never know. But it’s a tremendous risk. One girl I know