Page 171 - swanns-way

horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration; and they
were made more lovely still by the scalloped outline of the
dark leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over
a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness.
Though I dared not look at them save through my fingers,
I could feel that the formal scheme was composed of living
things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the
shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament
of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of
what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery.
Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there
with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final,
almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender
as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist,
that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate,
somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming,
I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the
head with an enticing glance from her contracted pupils, by
a young girl in white, careless and alive.
M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat
down beside us. He belonged to a good family, and had once
been music-master to my grandmother’s sisters; so that
when, after losing his wife and inheriting some property,
he had retired to the neighbourhood of Combray, we used
often to invite him to our house. But with his intense prud-
ishness he had given up coming, so as not to be obliged to
meet Swann, who had made what he called ‘a most unsuit-
able marriage, as seems to be the fashion in these days.’ My
mother, on hearing that he ‘composed,’ told him by way of

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