Page 305 - swanns-way

not be very long, and the way in which she had looked at
him then, fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze,
which gave her a touching air beneath the bunches of ar-
tificial pansies fastened in the front of her round bonnet
of white straw, tied with strings of black velvet. ‘And won’t
you,’ she had ventured, ‘come just once and take tea with
me?’ He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay—which, in
reality, he had abandoned years ago—on Vermeer of Delft.
‘I know that I am quite useless,’ she had replied, ‘a little wild
thing like me beside a learned great man like you. I should
be like the frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like
to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would
be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a
lot of old papers!’ she had gone on, with that self-satisfied
air which a smart woman adopts when she insists that her
one desire is to give herself up, without fear of soiling her
fingers, to some unclean task, such as cooking the dinner,
with her ‘hands right in the dish itself.’ ‘You will only laugh
at me, but this painter who stops you from seeing me,’ she
meant Vermeer, ‘I have never even heard of him; is he alive
still? Can I see any of his things in Paris, so as to have some
idea of what is going on behind that great brow which works
so hard, that head which I feel sure is always puzzling away
about things; just to be able to say ‘There, that’s what he’s
thinking about!’ What a dream it would be to be able to help
you with your work.’
He had sought an excuse in his fear of forming new
friendships, which he gallantly described as his fear of a
hopeless passion. ‘You are afraid of falling in love? How fun-

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