es to my prejudice. Even the injuries
we do them will not easily divert from the path of their duty towards us
those conventional natures of which my great-aunt furnished a type: who,
after quarrelling for years with a niece, to whom she never spoke again,
yet made no change in the will in which she had left that niece the
whole of her fortune, because she was her next-of-kin, and it was the
'proper thing' to do.

But I was fond of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the
insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely
meaningless' beauty of _La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae_ tired me more
and made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with
him, unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind. And he
would still have been received at Combray but for one thing. That same
night, after dinner, having informed me (a piece of news which had a
great influence on my later life, making it happier at one time and then
more unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that
there was not one of them whose resistance a man could not overcome,
he had gone on to assure me that he had heard it said on unimpeachable
authority that my great-aunt herself had led a 'gay' life in her younger
days, and had been notoriously 'kept.' I could not refrain from passing
on so important a piece of information to my parents; the next time
Bloch called he was not admitted, and afterwards, when I met him in the
street, he greeted me with extreme coldness.

But in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly.

For the first few days, like a tune which will be running in one's head
and maddening one soon enough, but of which one has not for the moment
'got hold,' the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's style
had not yet caught my eye. I could not, it is true, lay down the novel
of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the
story alone, as in the first dawn of love, when we go every day to meet
a woman at some party or entertainment by the charm of which we imagine
it is that we are attracted. Then I observed the rare, almost archaic
phrases which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden flow
of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the work itself would
animate and elevate his style; and it was at such points as these,
too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the
"inexhaustible torrent of fai