Page 302 - swanns-way

some, and each will name different examples, who are the
converse of the type which our senses demand. To give him
any pleasure her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate,
her cheek-bones too prominent, her features too tightly
drawn. Her eyes were fine, but so large that they seemed to
be bending beneath their own weight, strained the rest of
her face and always made her appear unwell or in an ill hu-
mour. Some time after this introduction at the theatre she
had written to ask Swann whether she might see his collec-
tions, which would interest her so much, she, ‘an ignorant
woman with a taste for beautiful things,’ saying that she
would know him better when once she had seen him in his
‘home,’ where she imagined him to be ‘so comfortable with
his tea and his books”; although she had not concealed her
surprise at his being in that part of the town, which must be
so depressing, and was ‘not nearly smart enough for such a
very smart man.’ And when he allowed her to come she had
said to him as she left how sorry she was to have stayed so
short a time in a house into which she was so glad to have
found her way at last, speaking of him as though he had
meant something more to her than the rest of the people she
knew, and appearing to unite their two selves with a kind of
romantic bond which had made him smile. But at the time
of life, tinged already with disenchantment, which Swann
was approaching, when a man can content himself with be-
ing in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too
much in return, this linking of hearts, if it is no longer, as in
early youth, the goal towards which love, of necessity, tends,
still is bound to love by so strong an association of ideas that

302 Swann’s Way