Page 231 - swanns-way

they invoked them in common with him, as though we were
all thorough good fellows of the same sort) they appeared to
suggest were in no way infringed at Mont-jouvain. M. Vin-
teuil did not send his daughter to visit Swann, an omission
which Swann was the first to regret. For constantly, after
meeting M. Vinteuil, he would remember that he had been
meaning for a long time to ask him about some one of the
same name as himself, one of his relatives, Swann supposed.
And on this occasion he determined that he would not for-
get what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil should
appear with his daughter at Tansonville.
Since the ‘Méséglise way’ was the shorter of the two that
we used to take for our walks round Combray, and for that
reason was reserved for days of uncertain weather, it fol-
lowed that the climate of Méséglise shewed an unduly high
rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of Rous-
sainville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for
shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves.
Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which
impinged on its roundness, but whose edge the sun gild-
ed in return. The brightness, though not the light of day,
would then be shut off from a landscape in which all life
appeared to be suspended, while the little village of Rous-
sainville carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of its
gables, with a startling precision of detail. A gust of wind
blew from its perch a rook, which floated away and settled
in the distance, while beneath a paling sky the woods on the
horizon assumed a deeper tone of blue, as though they were
painted in one of those cameos which you still find decorat-

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