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 afternoon. There was,
however, an occasional development. One day, we had gone with Gilberte
to the stall of our own special 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 consumed 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
finally explained in passionate tones: "I want the other plum; it's got
a worm in it!" I purchased two ha'penny marbles. With admiring eyes I
saw, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl by themselves, the agate marbles
which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as
little girls, and because they cost five-pence each. Gilberte, who was
given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked me which I
thought the prettiest. They were as transparent, as liquid-seeming as
life itself. I would not have had her sacrifice a single one of them.
I should have liked her to be able to buy them, to liberate them all.
Still, I pointed out one that had the same colour as her eyes. Gilberte
took it, turned it about until it shone with a ray of gold, fondled it,
paid its ransom, but at once handed me her captive, saying: "Take it; it
is for you, I give it to you, keep it to remind yourself of me."

Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Berma in
classic drama, I had asked her whether she had not a copy of a pamphlet
in which Bergotte spoke of Racine, and which was now out of