t that the walls were
panelled. Some time later she spoke to him again of her friend, and
added, in the hesitating but confident tone in which one refers to a
person whom one has met somewhere, at dinner, the night before, of whom
one had never heard until then, but whom one's hosts seemed to regard as
some one so celebrated and important that one hopes that one's listener
will know quite well who is meant, and will be duly impressed: "Her
dining-room... is... eighteenth century!" Incidentally, she had thought
it hideous, all bare, as though the house were still unfinished; women
looked frightful in it, and it would never become the fashion. She
mentioned it again, a third time, when she shewed Swann a card with the
name and address of the man who had designed the dining-room, and whom
she wanted to send for, when she had enough money, to see whether he
could not do one for her too; not one like that, of course, but one
of the sort she used to dream of, one which, unfortunately, her little
house would not be large enough to contain, with tall sideboards,
Renaissance furniture and fireplaces like the Chateau at Blois. It was
on this occasion that she let out to Swann what she really thought of
his abode on the Quai d'Orleans; he having ventured the criticism that
her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for, he went on,
although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming,
but in the 'Sham-Antique.'

"You wouldn't have her live, like you, among a lot of broken-down chairs
and threadbare carpets!" she exclaimed, the innate respectability of
the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the
acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.'

People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised
sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour
and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of
humanity. There was no need actually to have those tastes, provided
one talked enough about them; when a man had told her at dinner that he
loved to wander about and get his hands all covered with dust in the
old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in
this commercial age, since he was not concerned about the things that
interested it, and that he belonged to another generation altogether,
she would come home saying: "Why, he's an adorable creature; so
sensitive! I had no idea," and she would conceive for him