Page 199 - swanns-way

At home, meanwhile, we had no longer any illusions as
to M. Legrandin, and our relations with him had become
much more distant. Mamma would be greatly delighted
whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin, which he
continued to call the unpardonable sin, of snobbery. As for
my father, he found it difficult to take Legrandin’s airs in so
light, in so detached a spirit; and when there was some talk,
one year, of sending me to spend the long summer holidays
at Balbec with my grandmother, he said: ‘I must, most cer-
tainly, tell Legrandin that you are going to Balbec, to see
whether he will offer you an introduction to his sister. He
probably doesn’t remember telling us that she lived within
a mile of the place.’
My grandmother, who held that, when one went to the
seaside, one ought to be on the beach from morning to night,
to taste the salt breezes, and that one should not know any-
one in the place, because calls and parties and excursions
were so much time stolen from what belonged, by rights, to
the sea-air, begged him on no account to speak to Legran-
din of our plans; for already, in her mind’s eye, she could see
his sister, Mme. de Cambremer, alighting from her carriage
at the door of our hotel just as we were on the point of going
out fishing, and obliging us to remain indoors all afternoon
to entertain her. But Mamma laughed her fears to scorn, for
she herself felt that the danger was not so threatening, and
that Legrandin would shew no undue anxiety to make us
acquainted with his sister. And, as it happened, there was
no need for any of us to introduce the subject of Balbec, for
it was Legrandin himself who, without the least suspicion

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