Page 379 - swanns-way

that it was ‘mediaeval’; by which she meant that the walls
were panelled. Some time later she spoke to him again of
her friend, and added, in the hesitating but confident tone
in which one refers to a person whom one has met some-
where, at dinner, the night before, of whom one had never
heard until then, but whom one’s hosts seemed to regard
as some one so celebrated and important that one hopes
that one’s listener will know quite well who is meant, and
will be duly impressed: ‘Her dining-room... is... eighteenth
century!’ Incidentally, she had thought it hideous, all bare,
as though the house were still unfinished; women looked
frightful in it, and it would never become the fashion. She
mentioned it again, a third time, when she shewed Swann
a card with the name and address of the man who had de-
signed the dining-room, and whom she wanted to send for,
when she had enough money, to see whether he could not
do one for her too; not one like that, of course, but one of
the sort she used to dream of, one which, unfortunately, her
little house would not be large enough to contain, with tall
sideboards, Renaissance furniture and fireplaces like the
Château at Blois. It was on this occasion that she let out to
Swann what she really thought of his abode on the Quai
d’Orléans; he having ventured the criticism that her friend
had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for, he went on, al-
though that was not, of course, done, still it might be made
charming, but in the ‘Sham-Antique.’
‘You wouldn’t have her live, like you, among a lot of bro-
ken-down chairs and threadbare carpets!’ she exclaimed,
the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife

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