Page 449 - swanns-way

for her; disappointed to find that, after living for more than
six months in daily contact with myself, she has not been
capable of improving her mind even to the point of sponta-
neously eradicating from it a taste for Victor Massé! More
than that, to find that she has not arrived at the stage of un-
derstanding that there are evenings on which anyone with
the least shade of refinement of feeling should be willing to
forego an amusement when she is asked to do so. She ought
to have the sense to say: ‘I shall not go,’ if it were only from
policy, since it is by what she answers now that the quality
of her soul will be determined once and for all.’ And having
persuaded himself that it was solely, after all, in order that
he might arrive at a favourable estimate of Odette’s spiritual
worth that he wished her to stay at home with him that eve-
ning instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he adopted
the same line of reasoning with her, with the same degree of
insincerity as he had used with himself, or even with a de-
gree more, for in her case he was yielding also to the desire
to capture her by her own self-esteem.
‘I swear to you,’ he told her, shortly before she was to
leave for the theatre, ‘that, in asking you not to go, I should
hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that
you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do
this evening, and I shall feel that I have been tricked and
trapped myself, and shall be thoroughly annoyed, if, after
all, you tell me that you are not going. But my occupations,
my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also. A
day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from
you, you will be entitled to reproach me with not having

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