Swann's Way

Lyons?" and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her
glasses, at the other visitors.

But if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this Swann, who, in his
capacity as the son of old M. Swann, was 'fully qualified' to be
received by any of the 'upper middle class,' the most respected
barristers and solicitors of Paris (though he was perhaps a trifle
inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into abeyance), had another
almost secret existence of a wholly different kind: that when he left
our house in Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no
sooner have turned the corner than he would stop, retrace his steps, and
be off to some drawing-room on whose like no stockbroker or associate
of stockbrokers had ever set eyes--that would have seemed to my aunt
as extraordinary as, to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being
herself on terms of intimacy with Aristaeus, of knowing that he would,
when he had finished his conversation with her, plunge deep into the
realms of Thetis, into an empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which
Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms; or--to be content
with an image more likely to have occurred to her, for she had seen it