ention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she
herself had just noticed it for the first time: "Oh! there's my father's
picture looking at us; I can't think who can have put it there; I'm sure
I've told them twenty times, that is not the proper place for it."

I remembered the words that M. Vinteuil had used to my parents in
apologising for an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was, of
course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to
daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently
a liturgical response: "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 nature, 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 gratification 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 attraction 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 actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred
rights of fatherhood. Her friend took the girl's head in her hands and
placed a kiss on her brow with a docility prompted by the real affection
she had for Mlle. Vinteuil, as well as by the desire to bring what
distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.

"Do you know what I should like to do to that old horror?" she said,
taking up