Marcel Proust gets ready for dinner (i.e, 10 pages)

Marcel Proust (or his narrator, M - but whom are we kidding?) getting ready for dinner - wouldn't you expect that to take about five hour? or about 10 densely packed pages? And it does! In "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower," as M. comes in from the esplanade, thinking about the "gang of girls," the unattainable ones he's been admiring on the esplanade, and prepares to go out to dinner with his friend St.-Loup at a restaurant called Rivebelle (?), he first: gets in long discussion with the "lift" (elevator operator) about the Simonet family (he'd heard one of the girls may be Simonet) and asks if they're at the hotel, lies down on his bed and goes through several pages of description of the light coming through the windows of his room - this, actually, one of the most beautiful passages in all of the Search for Lost Time, and a bit unusual in that M. draws no conclusion, analogy, or metaphor from these observations, it's just a chance for him to show us the way he perceives the changing light of and above the sea and how he imagines the differences between looking at nature and the representation of nature in art - then gets dressed for dinner, some speculation about how as the season changes he will no longer be able to step directly in from the porch or front lawn into the dining area (they will close the glass partitions for warmth) - at last arriving at the restaurant where M. is uncharacteristically confident (the presence of the dashing, and older, St.-Loup encourages this) and indulgent - drinking heavily, tipping too much - everything's great, but where are the girls that he's hoping to impress with all his elan? Could it be that it's St.-Loup whom he really wants to impress? Is he even - for all his perspicacity - aware of this?