Page 194 - swanns-way

fashion.’ She added that; in any event, even if, at the worst,
he had been intentionally rude, it was far better for us to
pretend that we had noticed nothing. And indeed my fa-
ther himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the
attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still have held
in reserve a final uncertainty as to its true meaning. It was
like every attitude or action which reveals a man’s deep and
hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has pre-
viously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the
culprit’s evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced
to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in
the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recol-
lection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims
of a hallucination; with the result that such attitudes, and
these alone are of importance in indicating character, are
the most apt to leave us in perplexity.
I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house, by
moonlight. ‘There is a charming quality, is there not,’ he
said to me, ‘in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as
mine is, a novelist, whom you will read in time to come,
claims that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And
see you this, my boy, there comes in all lives a time, towards
which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can en-
dure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening
like this prepares for us in the stillroom of darkness, when
the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight
breathes through the flute of silence.’
I could hear what M. Legrandin was saying; like every-
thing that he said, it sounded attractive; but I was disturbed

194 Swann’s Way