" An
hour or so later he received a note from Odette, and at once recognised
that florid handwriting, in which an affectation of British stiffness
imposed an apparent discipline upon its shapeless characters, significant,
perhaps, to less intimate eyes than his, of an untidiness of mind, a
fragmentary education, a want of sincerity and decision. Swann had left
his cigarette-case at her house. "Why," she wrote, "did you not forget
your heart also? I should never have let you have that back."
More important, perhaps, was a second visit which he paid her, a little
later. On his way to the house, as always when he knew that they were to
meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he was
to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and rosy
protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of those
cheeks which were so often languorous and sallow, except when they were
punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute depression, as
proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and one's actual
happiness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which she had asked to
see.
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