Suddenly he broke away from his mother, who had put her arm round his neck, and, coming towards me, led me behind the little flower-strewn counter at which Mme. de Villeparisis had resumed her seat, making a sign to me to follow him into the smaller room. I was hurrying after him when M. de Charlus, who must have supposed that I was leaving the house, turned abruptly from Prince von Faffenheim, to whom he had been talking, and made a rapid circuit which brought him face to face with me. I saw with alarm that he had taken the hat in the lining of which were a capital ‘G’ and a ducal coronet. In the doorway into the little room he said, without looking at me: “As I see that you have taken to going into society, you must do me the pleasure of coming to see me. But it’s a little complicated,” he went on with a distracted, calculating air, as if the pleasure had been one that he was afraid of not securing again once he had let slip the opportunity of arranging with me the means by which it might be realised. “I am very seldom at home; you will have to write to me. But I should prefer to explain things to you more quietly. I am just going. Will you walk a short way with me? I shall only keep you a moment.” “You’ld better take care, sir,” I warned him; “you have picked up the wrong hat by mistake.” “Do you want to stop me taking my own hat?” I assumed, a similar mishap having recently occurred to myself, that someone else having taken his hat he had seized upon one at random, so as not to go home bare-headed, and that I had placed him in a difficulty by exposing his stratagem. I told him that I must say a few words to Saint-Loup. “He is still talking to that idiot the Duc de Guermantes,” I added. “That really is charming; I shall tell my brother.” “Oh! you think that would interest M. de Charlus?” (I imagined that, if he had a brother, that brother must be called Charlus also. Saint-Loup had indeed explained his family tree to me at Balbec, but I had forgotten the details.) “Who has been talking to you about M. de Charlus?” replied the Baron in an arrogant tone. “Go to Robert.” “I hear,” he went on, “that you took part this morning in one of those orgies that he has with a woman who is disgracing him. You would do well to use your influence with him to make him realise the pain he is causing his poor mother, and all of us, by dragging our name in the dirt.”