Dr. Cottard; for seeing him close one eye with an ambiguous smile, before they had yet spoken to one another (a grimace which Cottard styled “letting ’em all come”), Swann supposed that the Doctor recognised him from having met him already somewhere, probably in some house of “ill-fame,” though these he himself very rarely visited, never having made a habit of indulging in the mercenary sort of love. Regarding such an allusion as in bad taste, especially before Odette, whose opinion of himself it might easily alter for the worse, Swann assumed his most icy manner. But when he learned that the lady next to the Doctor was Mme. Cottard, he decided that so young a husband would not deliberately, in his wife’s hearing, have made any allusion to amusements of that order, and so ceased to interpret the Doctor’s expression in the sense which he had at first suspected. The painter at once invited Swann to visit his studio with Odette, and Swann found him very pleasant. “Perhaps you will be more highly favoured than I have been,” Mme.