Page 640 - swanns-way

But I can promise you, we didn’t look in the least like people
who had quarrelled. We were kept waiting there for some
time, while they brought him his parcel. He asked after you;
he told me you had been playing with his daughter—‘ my
mother went on, amazing me with the portentous revela-
tion of my own existence in Swann’s mind; far more than
that, of my existence in so complete, so material a form
that when I stood before him, trembling with love, in the
Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my
mother was, and had been able to blend with my quality
as his daughter’s playmate certain facts with regard to my
grandparents and their connections, the place in which we
lived, certain details of our past life, all of which I myself
perhaps did not know. But my mother did not seem to have
noticed anything particularly attractive in that counter at
the Trois Quartiers where she had represented to Swann, at
the moment in which he caught sight of her, a definite per-
son with whom he had sufficient memories in common to
impel him to come up to her and to speak.
Nor did either she or my father seem to find any occasion
now to mention Swann’s family, the grandparents of Gil-
berte, nor to use the title of stockbroker, topics than which
nothing else gave me so keen a pleasure. My imagination
had isolated and consecrated in the social Paris a certain
family, just as it had set apart in the structural Paris a cer-
tain house, on whose porch it had fashioned sculptures and
made its windows precious. But these ornaments I alone had
eyes to see. Just as my father and mother looked upon the
house in which Swann lived as one that closely resembled

640 Swann’s Way