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 not convince her of, with a whole afternoon at one's disposal!

The journey in the suburban train was uncomfortable, and they both had a mind for silence. The aunt lived in a cheaply over-ornamented villa on the shore of the lake near the casino, and Grover took the boat and rowed through waters clogged with reeds while Olga went inside to rummage. She had brought an empty portmanteau in which to take back some articles that belonged to her.

Something squinted. First of all, how could Olga and Léon have an aunt who was obviously a Jewess?

The explanation was forthcoming after dinner, when they waited at the station for their train. The so-called aunt was merely the woman with whom Olga's father had spent his last years on earth. This woman had been kinder than her mother, an ex-musichall artiste who was now at large in the south, when last heard of. The most astonishing part of the revelation was that Olga could apparently be left unmoved by all the implied sordidness in such a state of affairs. With Olga's taste, with all the qualities that set her apart and enshrined her, it was hard to reconcile the lack of shame for such gracelessness in the very structure of one's family. He dropped it into the limbo of subjects on which it is unprofitable to dwell.

It was eleven o'clock when they reached the house on Montparnasse. Olga had said nothing in contradiction to what she had said during lunch, but her