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 a strong and sudden
friendship.
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