eeing her in her coif and hearing her say that she
believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose
taste for the fine arts develops independently of their sensuality, a
grotesque disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would
accord to either taste simultaneously; yielding to the seduction of
works of art which grew more and more subtle as the women in whose
company he enjoyed them grew more illiterate and common, he would take a
little servant-girl to a screened box in a theatre where there was some
decadent piece which he had wished to see performed, or to an exhibition
of impressionist painting, with the conviction, moreover, that an
educated, 'society' woman would have understood them no better, but
would not have managed to keep quiet about them so prettily. But, now
that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share her
sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit was a task so
attractive that he tried to find satisfaction in the things that she
liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in copying her habits but in
adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits
and opinions sprang from no roots in her intelligence, they suggested
to him nothing except that love, for the sake of which he had preferred
them to his own. If he went again to _Serge Panine_, if he looked out
for opportunities of going to watch Olivier Metra conducting, it was for
the pleasure of being initiated into every one of the ideas in Odette's
mind, of feeling that he had an equal share in all her tastes. This
charm of drawing him closer to her, which her favourite plays and
pictures and places possessed, struck him as being more mysterious than
the intrinsic charm of more beautiful things and places, which appealed
to him by their beauty, but without recalling her. Besides, having
allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to grow faint, until his
scepticism, as a finished 'man of the world,' had gradually penetrated
them unawares, he held (or at least he had held for so long that he had
fallen into the habit of saying) that the objects which we admire have
no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of
dates and castes, and consists in a series of fashions, the most vulgar
of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most
refined. And as he had decided that the importance which Odette attached
to receiving cards tot a pri