Page 400 - swanns-way
P. 400

don’t know what—this glass, say; and he’d talk away about
         it for hours; no, not this glass; that’s a silly thing to say, I’m
         sorry; but something a little bigger, like the battle of Water-
         loo, or anything of that sort, he’d tell you things you simply
         wouldn’t believe. Why, Swann was in the regiment then; he
         must have known him.’
            ‘Do you see much of M. Swann?’ asked Mme. Verdurin.
            ‘Oh dear, no!’ he answered, and then, thinking that if
         he made himself pleasant to Swann he might find favour
         with Odette, he decided to take this opportunity of flatter-
         ing him by speaking of his fashionable friends, but speaking
         as a man of the world himself, in a tone of good-natured
         criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann
         upon some undeserved good fortune: ‘Isn’t that so, Swann?
         I never see anything of you, do I?—But then, where on earth
         is one to see him? The creature spends all his time shut up
         with the La Trémoïlles, with the Laumes and all that lot!’
         The imputation would have been false at any time, and was
         all the more so, now that for at least a year Swann had given
         up going to almost any house but the Verdurins’. But the
         mere names of families whom the Verdurins did not know
         were received by them in a reproachful silence. M. Verdu-
         rin, dreading the painful impression which the mention of
         these ‘bores,’ especially when flung at her in this tactless
         fashion, and in front of all the ‘faithful,’ was bound to make
         on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anx-
         ious solicitude. He saw then that in her fixed resolution to
         take no notice, to have escaped contact, altogether, with the
         news which had just been addressed to her, not merely to

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