Page 51 - swanns-way

infinitely more serious than they. When I went out to meet
my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she saw
that I had remained up so as to say good night to her again
in the passage, I should not be allowed to stay in the house
a day longer, I should be packed off to school next morning;
so much was certain. Very good: had I been obliged, the
next moment, to hurl myself out of the window, I should
still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was
Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far
along the road which led to the realisation of this desire to
be able to retrace my steps.
I could hear my parents’ footsteps as they went with
Swann; and, when the rattle of the gate assured me that he
had really gone, I crept to the window. Mamma was asking
my father if he had thought the lobster good, and whether
M. Swann had had some of the coffee-and-pistachio ice. ‘I
thought it rather so-so,’ she was saying; ‘next time we shall
have to try another flavour.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ said my great-aunt, ‘what a change I
find in Swann. He is quite antiquated!’ She had grown so
accustomed to seeing Swann always in the same stage of ad-
olescence that it was a shock to her to find him suddenly less
young than the age she still attributed to him. And the oth-
ers too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal,
excessive, scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in
one of that class for whom it seems that the great day which
knows no morrow must be longer than for other men, since
for such a one it is void of promise, and from its dawn the
moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent par-

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