“At least three weeks,” put in the Duchess; “even round Paris, where they’re very far forward. Down in Normandy, don’t you know, at his father’s place,” she went on, pointing to the young Duc de Châtellerault, “where they have some splendid apple trees close to the seashore, like a Japanese screen, they’re never really pink until after the twentieth of May.”

“I never see them,” said the young Duke, “because they give me hay fever. Such a bore.”

“Hay fever? I never heard of that before,” said the historian.

“It’s the fashionable complaint just now,” the librarian informed him.

“That all depends, you won’t get it at all, probably, if it’s a good year for apples. You know Le Normand’s saying: ‘When it’s a good year for apples⁠ ⁠… ,’ ” put in M. d’Argencourt who, not being really French, was always trying to give himself a Parisian air.