Page 255 - swanns-way

a creature formed not out of kindness and long-suffering,
but out of self-indulgence and cruelty. She was able to de-
lude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed
amusing herself in the way in which, with so unnatural an
accomplice, a girl might amuse herself who really did expe-
rience that savage antipathy towards her father’s memory.
Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state
so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refresh-
ing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as
in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the
sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be
given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
If the ‘Méséglise way’ was so easy, it was a very different
matter when we took the ‘Guermantes way,’ for that meant
a long walk, and we must make sure, first, of the weather.
When we seemed to have entered upon a spell of fine days,
when Françoise, in desperation that not a drop was fall-
ing upon the ‘poor crops,’ gazing up at the sky and seeing
there only a little white cloud floating here and there upon
its calm, azure surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed: ‘You
would say they were nothing more nor less than a lot of dog-
fish swimming about and sticking up their snouts! Ah, they
never think of making it rain a little for the poor labour-
ers! And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come,
rattling all over the place, and think no more of where it is
falling than if it was on the sea!’—when my father’s appeals
to the gardener had met with the same encouraging answer
several times in succession, then some one would say, at
dinner: ‘To-morrow, if the weather holds, we might go the

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