Page 169 - swanns-way

Saturday?’ And a quarter of an hour later we would still be
laughing, and reminding ourselves to go up and tell aunt
Léonie about this absurd mistake, to amuse her. The very
face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After lun-
cheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze
an hour longer in the zenith, and when some one, thinking
that we were late in starting for our walk, said, ‘What, only
two o’clock!’ feeling the heavy throb go by him of the twin
strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which as a rule
passed no one at that hour upon the highways, deserted for
the midday meal or for the nap which follows it, or on the
banks of the bright and ever-flowing stream, which even the
angler had abandoned, and so slipped unaccompanied into
the vacant sky, where only a few loitering clouds remained
to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus:
‘Why, you’re forgetting; we had luncheon an hour earlier;
you know very well it’s Saturday.’
The surprise of a ‘barbarian’ (for so we termed everyone
who was not acquainted with Saturday’s special customs)
who had called at eleven o’clock to speak to my father, and
had found us at table, was an event which used to cause Fran-
çoise as much merriment as, perhaps, anything that had
ever happened in her life. And if she found it amusing that
the nonplussed visitor should not have known, beforehand,
that we had our luncheon an hour earlier on Saturday, it
was still more irresistibly funny that my father himself (ful-
ly as she sympathised, from the bottom of her heart, with
the rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never
have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of

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