Page 174 - swanns-way

with M. Vinteuil, in the porch. Boys would be chevying one
another in the Square, and he would interfere, taking the
side of the little ones and lecturing the big. If his daugh-
ter said, in her thick, comfortable voice, how glad she had
been to see us, immediately it would seem as though some
elder and more sensitive sister, latent in her, had blushed at
this thoughtless, schoolboyish utterance, which had, per-
haps, made us think that she was angling for an invitation
to the house. Her father would then arrange a cloak over her
shoulders, they would clamber into a little dog-cart which
she herself drove, and home they would both go to Mont-
jouvain. As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with
no need to be up and stirring before high mass, if it was
a moonlight night and warm, then, instead of taking us
home at once, my father, in his thirst for personal distinc-
tion, would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary,
which my mother’s utter incapacity for taking her bearings,
or even for knowing which road she might be on, made her
regard as a triumph of his strategic genius. Sometimes we
would go as far as the viaduct, which began to stride on
its long legs of stone at the railway station, and to me typi-
fied all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts
of civilisation, because every year, as we came down from
Paris, we would be warned to take special care, when we
got to Combray, not to miss the station, to be ready before
the train stopped, since it would start again in two minutes
and proceed across the viaduct, out of the lands of Chris-
tendom, of which Combray, to me, represented the farthest
limit. We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which

174 Swann’s Way