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.
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