Now that motorcars have come in, it would be delightful. Unfortunately, in the interval he himself has made an even more astonishing marriage, which makes everything very difficult. Oh, Ma’am, life is a dreadful business, we spend our whole time doing things that bore us, and when by mere chance we come across somebody with whom we could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make a marriage like Swann’s. Faced with the alternatives of giving up my botanical expeditions and being obliged to call upon a degrading person, I chose the former calamity. Besides, when it comes to that, there was no need to go quite so far. It seems that here, in my own little bit of garden, more odd things happen in broad daylight than at midnight⁠—in the Bois de Boulogne! Only they attract no attention, because among flowers it’s all done quite simply, you see a little orange shower, or else a very dusty fly coming to wipe its feet or take a bath before crawling into a flower. And that does the trick!” “The cabinet the plant is standing on is splendid, too; it’s Empire, I think,” said the Princess, who, not being familiar with the works of Darwin and his followers, was unable to grasp the point of the Duchess’s pleasantries. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?