she would ever have allowed me to spend my
holidays in the same place as herself, when it came to choosing
that place she considered her parents' wishes, a thousand different
amusements of which she had been told, and not at all that it should be
the place to which my family were proposing to send me. When she assured
me (as sometimes happened) that she liked me less than some other of
her friends, less than she had liked me the day before, because by my
clumsiness I had made her side lose a game, I would beg her pardon, I
would beg her to tell me what I must do in order that she should begin
again to like me as much as, or more than the rest; I hoped to hear her
say that that was already my position; I besought her; as though she had
been able to modify her affection for me as she or I chose, to give me
pleasure, merely by the words that she would utter, as my good or bad
conduct should deserve. Was I, then, not yet aware that what I felt,
myself, for her, depended neither upon her actions nor upon my desires?

It shewed me finally, the new arrangement planned by my unseen weaver,
that, if we find ourselves hoping that the actions of a person who has
hitherto caused us anxiety may prove not to have been sincere, they shed
in their wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish, a
light to which, rather than to our hopes, we must put the question, what
will be that person's actions on the morrow.

These new counsels, my love listened and heard them; they persuaded it
that the morrow would not be different from all the days that had gone
before; that Gilberte's feeling for me, too long established now to
be capable of alteration, was indifference; that hi my friendship with
Gilberte, it was I alone who loved. "That is true," my love responded,
"there is nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will not alter
now." And so the very next day (unless I were to wait for a public
holiday, if there was one approaching, some anniversary, the New Year,
perhaps, one of those days which are not like other days, on which time
starts afresh, casting aside the heritage of the past, declining its
legacy of sorrows) I would appeal to Gilberte to terminate our old and
to join me in laying the foundations of a new friendship.

* * *

I had always, within reach, a plan of Paris, which, because I could see
drawn on it the street in which M. and Mme. Swann lived, seemed to me to
contain a secret treasure. And to p