Page 117 - swanns-way

as a young lady of good family, her who was no longer of a
family at all.
We had gone by this time into the ‘study,’ and my uncle,
who seemed a trifle embarrassed by my presence, offered
her a cigarette.
‘No, thank you, dear friend,’ she said. ‘You know I only
smoke the ones the Grand Duke sends me. I tell him that
they make you jealous.’ And she drew from a case cigarettes
covered with inscriptions in gold, in a foreign language.
‘Why, yes,’ she began again suddenly. ‘Of course I have
met this young man’s father with you. Isn’t he your neph-
ew? How on earth could I have forgotten? He was so nice,
so charming to me,’ she went on, modestly and with feel-
ing. But when I thought to myself what must actually have
been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been so
charming), I, who knew my father’s coldness and reserve,
was shocked, as though at some indelicacy on his part, at
the contrast between the excessive recognition bestowed on
it and his never adequate geniality. It has since struck me
as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in
life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all
their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams
of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to
realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the
four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which
counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious set-
ting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of
men. And just as this one filled the smoking-room, where
my uncle was entertaining her in his alpaca coat, with her

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