Page 620 - swanns-way

it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually making
grow, as a book grows when one is writing it, she threw me
a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes
account of the external world in the reality of which his in-
tellect declines to believe, the same self which had made me
salute her before I had identified her now urged me to catch
the ball that she tossed to me (as though she had been a
companion, with whom I had come to play, and not a sister-
soul with whom my soul had come to be limited), made me,
out of politeness, until the time came when she had to I go,
address a thousand polite and trivial remarks to her, and so
prevented me both from keeping a silence in which I might
at last have laid my hand upon the indispensable, escaped
idea, and from uttering the words which might have made
that definite progress in the course of our love on which
I was always obliged to count only for the following after-
noon. There was, however, an occasional development. One
day, we had gone with Gilberte to the stall of our own spe-
cial vendor, who was always particularly nice to us, since it
was to her that M. Swann used to send for his gingerbread,
of which, for reasons of health (he suffered from a racial
eczema, and from the constipation of the prophets), he con-
sumed a great quantity,—Gilberte pointed out to me with
a laugh two little boys who were like the little artist and
the little naturalist in the children’s storybooks. For one of
them would not have a red stick of rock because he preferred
the purple, while the other, with tears in his eyes, refused a
plum which his nurse was buying for him, because, as he fi-
nally explained in passionate tones: ‘I want the other plum;

620 Swann’s Way