Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

The line contrasts conventional, surface-level beauty with the richer allure that imagination can create. Proust’s speaker implies that “pretty” women—those whose appeal is immediately legible and socially agreed upon—satisfy men who do not need to invent, interpret, or project. For an imaginative temperament, desire is intensified by mystery, idiosyncrasy, and the mind’s power to transform a face or gesture into a private mythology. The remark also satirizes fashionable taste: what is universally admired can feel artistically inert, while the imagination seeks the singular and the elusive. In Proustian terms, love is less a response to objective beauty than a creative act of perception.