sunrise lights different places, a long way apart, which have no connexion with one another. I did not hear the Ambassador’s reply, for the whole party, with a good deal of noise, had again gathered round Mme. de Villeparisis to watch her at work. “You know who’ we’re talking about, Basin?” the Duchess asked her husband. “I can make a pretty good guess,” said the Duke. “Ah! As an actress she’s not, I’m afraid, in what one would call the great tradition.” “You can’t imagine,” went on Mme. de Guermantes to M. d’Argencourt, “anything more ridiculous.” “In fact, it was drolatic,” put in M. de Guermantes, whose odd vocabulary enabled people in society to declare that he was no fool and literary people, at the same time, to regard him as a complete imbecile. “What I fail to understand,” resumed the Duchess, “is how in the world Robert ever came to fall in love with her. Oh, of course I know one mustn’t discuss that sort of thing,” she added, with the charming pout of a philosopher and sentimentalist whose last illusion had long been shattered. “I know that anybody may fall in love with anybody else. And,” she went on, for, though she might still laugh at modern literature, it, either by its dissemination through the popular press or else in the course of conversation, had begun to percolate into her mind, “that is the really nice thing about love, because it’s what makes it so ‘mysterious’.” “Mysterious! Oh, I must confess, cousin, that’s a bit beyond me,” said the Comte d’Argencourt. “Oh dear, yes, it’s a very mysterious thing, love,” declared the Duchess, with the sweet smile of a good-natured woman of the world, but also with the rooted conviction with which a Wagnerian assures a bored gentleman from the Club that there is something more than just noise in the _Walküre_. “After all, one never does know what makes one person fall in love with another; it may not be at all what we think,” she added with a smile, repudiating at once by this interpretation the idea she had just suggested. “After all, one never knows anything, does one?” she concluded with an air of weary scepticism. “Besides, one understands, doesn’t one; one simply can’t explain other people’s choices in love.” But having laid down this principle she proceeded at once to abandon it and to criticise Saint-Loup’s choice. “All the same, don’t you know, it is amazing to me that a man can find any attraction in a person who’s simply silly.”