Page 509 - swanns-way

a series of trapezes, from any one of which he might come
crashing, a hundred feet, to the ground, stealing now and
then a glance of astonishment and unbelief at her compan-
ion, as who should say: ‘It isn’t possible, I would never have
believed that a human being could do all that!’; Mme. de
Cambremer, as a woman who had received a sound musical
education, beating time with her head—transformed for the
nonce into the pendulum of a metronome, the sweep and ra-
pidity of whose movements from one shoulder to the other
(performed with that look of wild abandonment in her eye
which a sufferer shews who is no longer able to analyse his
pain, nor anxious to master it, and says merely ‘I can’t help
it’) so increased that at every moment her diamond earrings
caught in the trimming of her bodice, and she was obliged
to put straight the bunch of black grapes which she had in
her hair, though without any interruption of her constantly
accelerated motion. On the other side (and a little way in
front) of Mme. de Fran-quetot, was the Marquise de Gal-
lardon, absorbed in her favourite meditation, namely upon
her own kinship with the Guermantes family, from which
she derived both publicly and in private a good deal of glo-
ry no unmingled with shame, the most brilliant ornaments
of that house remaining somewhat aloof from her, perhaps
because she was just a tiresome old woman, or because she
was a scandalous old woman, or because she came of an
inferior branch of the family, or very possibly for no rea-
son at all. When she found herself seated next to some one
whom she did not know, as she was at this moment next to
Mme. de Franquetot, she suffered acutely from the feeling

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