straitlaced to suffocation or else completely buried.

But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her telling him how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again; he remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him that it might not be very long, and the way in which she had looked at him then, fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze, which gave her a touching air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with strings of black velvet. “And won’t you,” she had ventured, “come just once and take tea with me?” He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay⁠—which, in reality, he had abandoned years ago⁠—on Vermeer of Delft. “I know that I am quite useless,” she had replied, “a little wild thing like me beside a learned great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated.