Page 616 - swanns-way

ings; and while she dropped pellets of snow down my neck, I
smiled lovingly at what seemed to me at once a predilection
that she shewed for me in thus tolerating me as her travel-
ling companion in this new, this wintry land, and a sort of
loyalty to me which she preserved through evil times. Pres-
ently, one after another, like shyly bopping sparrows, her
friends arrived, black against the snow. We got ready to play
and, since this day which had begun so sadly was destined
to end in joy, as I went up, before the game started, to the
friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard, that first day,
calling Gilberte by name, she said to me: ‘No, no, I’m sure
you’d much rather be in Gilberte’s camp; besides, look, she’s
signalling to you.’ She was in fact summoning me to cross
the snowy lawn to her camp, to ‘take the field,’ which the
sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of
old and worn brocades, had turned into a Field of the Cloth
of Gold.
This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings,
was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not un-
duly wretched.
For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save
not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much
so that once, when my grandmother had not come home
by dinner-time, I could not resist the instinctive reflec-
tion that, if she had been run over in the street and killed, I
should not for some time be allowed to play in the Champs-
Elysées; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone),
yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which
I had waited with so much impatience all night and morn-

616 Swann’s Way