Page 55 - swanns-way

properly speaking, be called inexorable. He looked at me for
a moment with an air of annoyance and surprise, and then
when Mamma had told him, not without some embarrass-
ment, what had happened, said to her: ‘Go along with him,
then; you said just now that you didn’t feel like sleep, so stay
in his room for a little. I don’t need anything.’
‘But dear,’ my mother answered timidly, ‘whether or not
I feel like sleep is not the point; we must not make the child
accustomed...’
‘There’s no question of making him accustomed,’ said
my father, with a shrug of the shoulders; ‘you can see quite
well that the child is unhappy. After all, we aren’t gaolers.
You’ll end by making him ill, and a lot of good that will
do. There are two beds in his room; tell Françoise to make
up the big one for you, and stay beside him for the rest of
the night. I’m off to bed, anyhow; I’m not nervous like you.
Good night.’
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he
called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I
stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us,
an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with
the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since
he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up
his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Be-
nozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah
that she must tear herself away from Isaac. Many years have
passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which
I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was
long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have

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