“Quarrelled? What on earth made you think that we had quarrelled?” she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her friendly relations with Swann, and was planning an attempt to “bring them together.”

“He might be cross with you for never asking him here.”

“One isn’t obliged to ask everyone to one’s house, you know; has he ever asked me to his? I don’t know his wife.”

“But he used often to come, at Combray.”