Page 211 - swanns-way

liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a mira-
cle, Mlle. Swann appear, with her father, so close to us that
we should not have time to escape, and should therefore be
obliged to make her acquaintance. And so, when I suddenly
noticed a straw basket lying forgotten on the grass by the
side of a line whose float was bobbing in the water, I made
a great effort to keep my father and grandfather looking in
another direction, away from this sign that she might, after
all, be in residence. Still, as Swann had told us that he ought
not, really, to go away just then, as he had some people stay-
ing in the house, the line might equally belong to one of
these guests. Not a footstep was to be heard on any of the
paths. Somewhere in one of the tall trees, making a stage in
its height, an invisible bird, desperately attempting to make
the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long, continuous
note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received
at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercus-
sion of silence and of immobility that, one would have said,
it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been
trying to make pass more quickly. The sunlight fell so im-
placably from a fixed sky that one was naturally inclined
to slip away out of the reach of its attentions, and even the
slumbering water, whose repose was perpetually being in-
vaded by the insects that swarmed above its surface, while it
dreamed, no doubt, of some imaginary maelstrom, intensi-
fied the uneasiness which the sight of that floating cork had
wrought in me, by appearing to draw it at full speed across
the silent reaches of a mirrored firmament; now almost ver-
tical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight,

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