for anyone who chose
his associates outside the caste in which he had been born and bred,
outside his 'proper station,' was condemned to utter degradation in her
eyes. It seemed to her that such a one abdicated all claim to enjoy the
fruits of those friendly relations with people of good position which
prudent parents cultivate and store up for their children's benefit, for
my great-aunt had actually ceased to 'see' the son of a lawyer we
had known because he had married a 'Highness' and had thereby stepped
down--in her eyes--from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to
that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly,
to whom we read that queens have sometimes shewn their favours. She
objected, therefore, to my grandfather's plan of questioning Swann, when
next he came to dine with us, about these people whose friendship with
him we had discovered. On the other hand, my grandmother's two sisters,
elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her
intelligence, declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their
brother-in-law could find in talking about such trifles. They were
ladies of lofty ambition, who for that reason were incapable of taking
the least interest in what might be called the 'pinchbeck' things of
life, even when they had an historic value, or, generally speaking, in
anything that was not directly associated with some object aesthetically
precious. So complete was their negation of interest in anything which
seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life that their
sense of hearing--which had gradually come to understand its own
futility when the tone of the conversation, at the dinner-table, became
frivolous or merely mundane, without the two old ladies' being able to
guide it back to the topic dear to themselves--would leave its receptive
channels unemployed, so effectively that they were actually becoming
atrophied. So that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of
the two sisters, he would have to make use of some such alarm signals
as mad-doctors adopt in dealing with their distracted patients; as by
beating several times on a glass with the blade of a knife, fixing them
at the same time with a sharp word and a compelling glance, violent
methods which the said doctors are apt to bring with them into their
everyday life among the sane, either from force of professional habit or
because they think the whole world a trifle mad.

The