Swann's Way

with a kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now
exasperated him. "Yet I'm not really angry," he assured himself, "when I
see how she longs to run away and scratch from maggots in that
dunghill of cacophony. I'm disappointed; not for myself, but 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 spontaneously eradicating from it a taste for
Victor Massé! More than that, to find that she has not arrived at the
stage of understanding 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 evening
instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he adopted the same line of