tress who does not have
to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary
clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the
background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was glad to
find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of
art were very different--at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had
attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies--from those in
which the moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have
recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine,
some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the
sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and
as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it
enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one
ought to set before children, and that children shewed their own innate
good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would
continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt
they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded
vision could not fail to discern, without needing to have their
equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one's
heart.

It was along the 'Meseglise way,' at Montjouvain, a house built on the
edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that
M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her
dogcart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never
saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than
herself, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end
installed herself permanently, one day, at Montjouvain. People said:
"That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by love not to see what everyone
is talking about, and to let his daughter--a man who is horrified if you
use a word in the wrong sense--bring a woman like that to live under his
roof. He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold,
and that she would have shewn extraordinary musical talent if she had
only been trained. He may be sure it is not music that she is teaching
his daughter." But M. Vinteuil assured them that it was, and indeed
it is remarkable that people never fail to arouse admiration of their
normal qualities in the relatives of anyone with whom they are in
physical intercourse. Bodily passion, which has