Page 375 - swanns-way

to secure invitations for herself. Perhaps she felt that such
attempts would be bound to fail; perhaps, indeed, she feared
lest, merely by speaking of her to his friends, he should pro-
voke disclosures of an unwelcome kind. The fact remains
that she had consistently held him to his promise never to
mention her name. Her reason for not wishing to go into
society was, she had told him, a quarrel which she had had,
long ago, with another girl, who had avenged herself by say-
ing nasty things about her. ‘But,’ Swann objected, ‘surely,
people don’t all know your friend.’ ‘Yes, don’t you see, it’s
like a spot of oil; people are so horrid.’ Swann was unable,
frankly, to appreciate this point; on the other hand, he knew
that such generalisations as ‘People are so horrid,’ and ‘A
word of scandal spreads like a spot of oil,’ were generally
accepted as true; there must, therefore, be cases to which
they were literally applicable. Could Odette’s case be one of
these? He teased himself with the question, though not for
long, for he too was subject to that mental oppression which
had so weighed upon his father, whenever he was faced by a
difficult problem. In any event, that world of society which
concealed such terrors for Odette inspired her, probably,
with no very great longing to enter it, since it was too far
removed from the world which she already knew for her to
be able to form any clear conception of it. At the same time,
while in certain respects she had retained a genuine simplic-
ity (she had, for instance, kept up a friendship with a little
dressmaker, now retired from business, up whose steep and
dark and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day),
she still thirsted to be in the fashion, though her idea of it

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