Her want of friends had enabled Princess Sherbatoff to show for some years past to the Verdurins a fidelity which made her more than an ordinary member of the “faithful,” the type of faithfulness, the ideal which Mme. Verdurin had long thought unattainable and which now, in her later years, she at length found incarnate in this new feminine recruit. However keenly the Mistress might feel the pangs of jealousy, it was without precedent that the most assiduous of her faithful should not have “failed” her at least once. The most stay-at-home yielded to the temptation to travel; the most continent fell from virtue; the most robust might catch influenza, the idlest be caught for his month’s soldiering, the most indifferent go to close the eyes of a dying mother. And it was in vain that Mme.