Page 501 - swanns-way

the ends of their several flower-beds. The peculiar tenden-
cy which he had always had to look for analogies between
living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself
here, but in a more positive and more general form; it was
society as a whole, now that he was detached from it, which
presented itself to him in a series of pictures. In the cloak-
room, into which, in the old days, when he was still a man of
fashion, he would have gone in his overcoat, to emerge from
it in evening dress, but without any impression of what had
occurred there, his mind having been, during the minute
or two that he had spent in it, either still at the party which
he had just left, or already at the party into which he was
just about to be ushered, he now noticed, for the first time,
roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest, the
scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the enormous
footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches
and chests, until, pointing their noble greyhound profiles,
they towered upon their feet and gathered in a circle round
about him.
One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not
unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which
represent executions, tortures, and the like, advanced
upon him with an implacable air to take his ‘things.’ But
the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the
softness of his cotton gloves, so effectively that, as he ap-
proached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an
utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard
for his hat. He took it with a care to which the precision of
his movements imparted something that was almost over-

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