Swann's Way

unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow her again
to tire herself in that way), and had there fallen back upon the four
pastoral novels of George Sand.

"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not allow myself to give the
child anything that was not well written."

The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything
from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all,
that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our
pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called
'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or
a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long
desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted
them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than
to serve the common requirements of our own. She would have liked me to
have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places.
But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the
picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity