Page 301 - swanns-way

dinners or for poker; every evening, after a slight ‘wave’ im-
parted to his stiffly brushed red locks had tempered with a
certain softness the ardour of his bold green eyes, he would
select a flower for his buttonhole and set out to meet his
mistress at the house of one or other of the women of his
circle; and then, thinking of the affection and admiration
which the fashionable folk, whom he always treated exactly
as he pleased, would, when he met them there, lavish upon
him in the presence of the woman whom he loved, he would
find a fresh charm in that worldly existence of which he had
grown weary, but whose substance, pervaded and warmly
coloured by the flickering light which he had slipped into its
midst, seemed to him beautiful and rare, now that he had
incorporated in it a fresh love.
But while each of these attachments, each of these flirta-
tions had been the realisation, more or less complete, of a
dream born of the sight of a face or a form which Swann had
spontaneously, and without effort on his part, found charm-
ing, it was quite another matter when, one day at the theatre,
he was introduced to Odette de Crécy by an old friend of his
own, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature
with whom he might very possibly come to an understand-
ing; but had made her out to be harder of conquest than
she actually was, so as to appear to be conferring a special
favour by the introduction. She had struck Swann not, cer-
tainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a style
of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him
no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repul-
sion; as one of those women of whom every man can name

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