Page 183 - swanns-way

distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be
agreeable, and who from the suddenly receding depths of
their eyes seem to have caught sight of you at the far end
of an interminably straight road, and at so great a distance
that they content themselves with directing towards you an
almost imperceptible movement of the head, in proportion
to your doll-like dimensions.
Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a
model of virtue, known and highly respected; there could
be no question of his being out for amorous adventure, and
annoyed at being detected; and my father asked himself
how he could possibly have displeased our friend.
‘I should be all the more sorry to feel that he was angry
with us,’ he said, ‘because among all those people in their
Sunday clothes there is something about him, with his little
cut-away coat and his soft neckties, so little ‘dressed-up,’ so
genuinely simple; an air of innocence, almost, which is re-
ally attractive.’
But the vote of the family council was unanimous, that
my father had imagined the whole thing, or that Legran-
din, at the moment in question, had been preoccupied in
thinking about something else. Anyhow, my father’s fears
were dissipated no later than the following evening. As we
returned from a long walk we saw, near the Pont-Vieux,
Legrandin himself, who, on account of the holidays, was
spending a few days more in Combray. He came up to us
with outstretched hand: ‘Do you know, master book-lover,’
he asked me, ‘this line of Paul Desjardins?
Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.

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