Page 343 - swanns-way

at seven o’clock, to go and dress for the evening, all the way
home, sitting bolt upright in his brougham, unable to re-
press the happiness with which the afternoon’s adventure
had filled him, he kept on repeating to himself: ‘What fun
it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where
one could always be certain of finding, what one never can
be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea.’ An hour or so
later he received a note from Odette, and at once recognised
that florid handwriting, in which an affectation of British
stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon its shapeless
characters, significant, perhaps, to less intimate eyes than
his, of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a
want of sincerity and decision. Swann had left his cigarette-
case at her house. ‘Why,’ she wrote, ‘did you not forget your
heart also? I should never have let you have that back.’
More important, perhaps, was a second visit which he
paid her, a little later. On his way to the house, as always
when he knew that they were to meet, he formed a pic-
ture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he was to find
any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and
rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out
all the rest of those cheeks which were so often languorous
and sallow, except when they were punctuated with little fi-
ery spots, plunged him in acute depression, as proving that
one’s ideal is always unattainable, and one’s actual happi-
ness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which she
had asked to see. She was not very well; she received him,
wearing a wrapper of mauve crêpe de Chine, which draped
her bosom, like a mantle, with a richly embroidered web.

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