From the first Saint-Loup made a conquest of my grandmother, not only by the incessant acts of kindness which he went out of his way to show to us both, but by the naturalness which he put into them as into everything. For naturalness⁠—doubtless because through the artifice of man it allows a feeling of nature to permeate⁠—was the quality which my grandmother preferred to all others, whether in gardens, where she did not like there to be, as there had been in our Combray garden, too formal borders, or at table, where she detested those dressed-up dishes in which you could hardly detect the foodstuff’s that had gone to make them, or in piano-playing, which she did not like to be too finicking, too laboured, having indeed had a special weakness for the discords, the wrong notes of Rubinstein. This naturalness she found and enjoyed even in the clothes that Saint-Loup wore, of a pliant elegance, with nothing swagger, nothing formal about them, no stiffness or starch.