Page 312 - swanns-way

supple limbs will carry out precisely the movement that is
required without any clumsy participation by the rest of his
body. The simple and elementary gestures used by a man
of the world when he courteously holds out his hand to the
unknown youth who is being introduced to him, and when
he bows discreetly before the Ambassador to whom he is
being introduced, had gradually pervaded, without his be-
ing conscious of it, the whole of Swann’s social deportment,
so that in the company of people of a lower grade than his
own, such as the Verdurins and their friends, he instinc-
tively shewed an assiduity, and made overtures with which,
by their account, any of their ‘bores’ would have dispensed.
He chilled, though for a moment only, on meeting Dr. Cot-
tard; for seeing him close one eye with an ambiguous smile,
before they had yet spoken to one another (a grimace which
Cottard styled ‘letting ‘em all come’), Swann supposed that
the Doctor recognised him from having met him already
somewhere, probably in some house of ‘ill-fame,’ though
these he himself very rarely visited, never having made a
habit of indulging in the mercenary sort of love. Regarding
such an allusion as in bad taste, especially before Odette,
whose opinion of himself it might easily alter for the worse,
Swann assumed his most icy manner. But when he learned
that the lady next to the Doctor was Mme. Cottard, he de-
cided that so young a husband would not deliberately, in his
wife’s hearing, have made any allusion to amusements of
that order, and so ceased to interpret the Doctor’s expres-
sion in the sense which he had at first suspected. The painter
at once invited Swann to visit his studio with Odette, and

312 Swann’s Way