Apart from the doctor's young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively
that season (for all that Mme. Verdurin herself was a thoroughly 'good'
woman, and came of a respectable middle-class family, excessively rich and
wholly undistinguished, with which she had gradually and of her own accord
severed all connection) to a young woman almost of a 'certain class,' a
Mme. de Crecy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her Christian name, Odette,
and pronounced a 'love,' and to the pianist's aunt, who looked as though
she had, at one period, 'answered the bell': ladies quite ignorant of the
world, who in their social simplicity were so easily led to believe that
the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse de Guermantes were obliged to pay
large sums of money to other poor wretches, in order to have anyone at
their dinner-parties, that if somebody had offered to procure them an
invitation to the house of either of those great dames, the old doorkeeper
and the woman of 'easy virtue' would have contemptuously declined.
The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your 'place laid'
there. There was never any programme for the evening's entertainment.
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