Swann's Way

beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, gave a woman,
that year, the appearance of being composed of different sections badly
fitted together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the
inner bodice follow, in complete independence, controlled only by the
fancy of their designer or the rigidity of their material, the line
which led them to the knots of ribbon, falls of lace, fringes of
vertically hanging jet, or carried them along the bust, but nowhere
attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the
architecture of their fripperies drew them towards or away from her
own, found herself either strait-laced to suffocation or else completely
buried.

But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her
telling him how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again;
he remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him
that it might not be very long, and the way in which she had looked at
him then, fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze, which gave her
a touching air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in
the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with strings of black