Page 496 - swanns-way

slightly bald head, of which people who know only of his
successes used to think: ‘He’s not regularly good-looking, if
you like, but he is smart; that tuft, that eyeglass, that smile!’
and, with more curiosity perhaps to know him as he really
was than desire to become his mistress, she would sigh:
‘I do wish I could find out what there is in that head of
yours!’
But, now, whatever he might say, she would answer, in a
tone sometimes of irritation, sometimes indulgent: ‘Ah! so
you never will be like other people!’
She would gaze at his head, which was hardly aged at all
by his recent anxieties (though people now thought of it, by
the same mental process which enables one to discover the
meaning of a piece of symphonic music of which one has
read the programme, or the ‘likenesses’ in a child whose
family one has known: ‘He’s not positively ugly, if you like,
but he is really rather absurd; that eyeglass, that tuft, that
smile!’ realising in their imagination, fed by suggestion, the
invisible boundary which divides, at a few months’ interval,
the head of an ardent lover from a cuckold’s), and would
say:
‘Oh, I do wish I could change you; put some sense into
that head of yours.’
Always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped, if
it was only Odette’s way of behaving to him that left room
for doubt, he would fling himself greedily upon her words:
‘You can if you like,’ he would tell her.
And he tried to explain to her that to comfort him, to
control him, to make him work would be a noble task, to

496 Swann’s Way