My Years With Proust - Day 374

   Some days later, at Balbec, while we were in the ballroom of the casino, there entered Bloch's sister and cousin, who had both turned out extremely pretty, but whom I refrained from greeting on account of my girl friends, because the young one, the cousin, was notoriously living with the actress whose acquaintance she had made during my first visit.  Andree, at a whispered allusion to this scandal, said to me: "Oh! about that sort of thing I'm like Albertine; there's nothing we both loathe so much as that sort of thing." As for Albertine, sitting down to talk to me on the sofa, she had turned her back on the disreputable pair.  I had noticed, however, that before she changed her position, at the moment when Mlle Bloch and her cousin appeared, a look of deep attentiveness had momentarily flitted across her eyes, a look that was wont to impart to the face of this mischievous girl a serious, indeed a solemn air, and left her pensive afterwards.  But Albertine had at once turned back towards me with a gaze which nevertheless remained strangely still and dreamy.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 830

"Methinks she protests too much."  A couple days after Albertine threatened to throw herself into the ocean and take her own life in response to Marcel's accusations all is apparently forgiven if not forgotten.  Albertine, Andree and Marcel see Bloch's sister and cousin, the latter of which has shocked polite society by "notoriously living with the actress whose acquaintance she had made during" Proust's first visit.  In what seems like a plant, Andree suddenly whispers to Marcel, "Oh! about that sort of thing I'm like Albertine; there's nothing we both loathe so much as that sort of thing.."  Essentially, I think Albertine and Andree put together one of the clumsiest ruses (I'm flashing back to an Archer episode) to deflect attention from their own desires and actions, and I suspect that Marcel is having the same reaction.  At the appearance of Bloch's sister and cousin "a look of deep attentiveness had momentarily flitted across" Albertine's eyes, and she turned towards Marcel "with a gaze which nevertheless remained strangely still and dreamy."