Page 173 - swanns-way

cautions her father used to take for her health, with spare
shawls always in readiness to wrap around her shoulders.
My grandmother had drawn our attention to the gentle, del-
icate, almost timid expression which might often be caught
flitting across the face, dusted all over with freckles, of this
otherwise stolid child. When she had spoken, she would at
once take her own words in the sense in which her audience
must have heard them, she would be alarmed at the pos-
sibility of a misunderstanding, and one would see, in clear
outline, as though in a transparency, beneath the mannish
face of the ‘good sort’ that she was, the finer features of a
young woman in tears.
When, before turning to leave the church, I made a gen-
uflection before the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a
bitter-sweet fragrance of almonds steal towards me from
the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed that on the flow-
ers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour, in
which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as
the taste of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the
sweetness of Mile. Vinteuil’s cheeks beneath their freck-
les. Despite the heavy, motionless silence of the hawthorns,
these gusts of fragrance came to me like the murmuring of
an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was quiver-
ing like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of
which I was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red
in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime viru-
lence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted
into flowers.
Outside the church we would stand talking for a moment

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