“Who? Me?”

The narrator is walking with the painter Elstir who — guess what? — is a friend of “the little band,” “the little gang of girls” whose remote beauty fascinates the narrator. Several of the girls come into view at the end of an avenue. Trusting that Elstir will make an introduction, the narrator turns his back, and stoops to look in the window of an antique shop, “as though fascinated by something.”

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

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