But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her
telling him how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again; he
remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him that it
might not be very long, and the way in which she had looked at him then,
fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze, which gave her a touching
air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in the front of her
round bonnet of white straw, tied with strings of black velvet. "And won't
you," she had ventured, "come just once and take tea with me?" He had
pleaded pressure of work, an essay--which, in reality, he had abandoned
years ago--on Vermeer of Delft. "I know that I am quite useless," she had
replied, "a little wild thing like me beside a learned great man like you.
I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like to
learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a
regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers!" she had gone
on, with that self-satisfied air which a smart woman adopts when she
insists that her one desire is to give herself up, without fear of soiling
her fingers, to some unclean task, such as cooking the dinner, with her
"hands right in the dish itself.
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