“I heard the whole of her conversation with the keeper,” she told me. “Could anything have been more typical of the Guermantes, or the Verdurins and their little circle? Heavens, what fine language she put it all in!” And she quoted, with deliberate application, this sentence from her own special Marquise, Mme. de Sévigné: “As I listened to them I thought that they were preparing for me the pleasures of a farewell.” Such was the speech that she made me, a speech into which she had put all her critical delicacy, her love of quotations, her memory of the classics, more thoroughly even than she would naturally have done, and as though to prove that she retained possession of all these faculties. But I guessed rather than heard what she said, so inaudible was the voice in which she muttered her sentences, clenching her teeth more than could be accounted for by the fear of being sick again. “Come!” I said lightly, so as not to seem to be taking her illness too seriously, “since your heart is bothering you, shall we go home now? I don’t want to trundle a grandmother with indigestion about the Champs-Elysées.” “I didn’t like to suggest it, because of your friends,” she replied. “Poor boy! But if you don’t mind, I think it would be wiser.” I was afraid of her noticing the strange way in which she uttered these words. “Come!” I said to her sharply, “you mustn’t tire yourself talking; if your heart is bad, it’s silly; wait till we get home.” She smiled at me sorrowfully and gripped my hand. She had realised that there was no need to hide from me what I had at once guessed, that she had had a slight stroke. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PART II ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _CHAPTER ONE_