er, this one doesn't knock spots off the
Professor. It comes more naturally with him, less like reading from a
book. Of course, the way he goes on, he does use some words that are
a bit realistic, and all that; but that's quite the thing nowadays;
anyhow, it's not often I've seen a man hold the floor as cleverly as
that, 'hold the spittoon,' as we used to say in the regiment, where, by
the way, we had a man he rather reminds me of. You could take anything
you liked--I don't know what--this glass, say; and he'd talk away about
it for hours; no, not this glass; that's a silly thing to say, I'm
sorry; but something a little bigger, like the battle of Waterloo, or
anything of that sort, he'd tell you things you simply wouldn't believe.
Why, Swann was in the regiment then; he must have known him."

"Do you see much of M. Swann?" asked Mme. Verdurin.

"Oh dear, no!" he answered, and then, thinking that if he made himself
pleasant to Swann he might find favour with Odette, he decided to
take this opportunity of flattering him by speaking of his fashionable
friends, but speaking as a man of the world himself, in a tone of
good-natured criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann
upon some undeserved good fortune: "Isn't that so, Swann? I never see
anything of you, do I?--But then, where on earth is one to see him? The
creature spends all his time shut up with the La Tremoilles, with the
Laumes and all that lot!" The imputation would have been false at any
time, and was all the more so, now that for at least a year Swann had
given up going to almost any house but the Verdurins'. But the mere
names of families whom the Verdurins did not know were received by them
in a reproachful silence. M. Verdurin, dreading the painful impression
which the mention of these 'bores,' especially when flung at her in this
tactless fashion, and in front of all the 'faithful,' was bound to
make on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anxious
solicitude. He saw then that in her fixed resolution to take no notice,
to have escaped contact, altogether, with the news which had just been
addressed to her, not merely to remain dumb but to have been deaf
as well, as we pretend to be when a friend who has been in the wrong
attempts to slip into his conversation some excuse which we should
appear to be accepting, should we appear to have heard it without
protesting, or when some one utters the name of an enemy, the very
mention o