how intensely
interested I was to know whether Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!

"Did you speak to him?" I asked.

"Why, of course I did," answered my mother, who always seemed afraid
lest, were she to admit that we were not on the warmest of terms with
Swann, people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for, in
view of the existence of Mme. Swann, whom she did not wish to know. "It
was he who came up and spoke to me. I hadn't seen him."

"Then you haven't quarrelled?"

"Quarrelled? What on earth made you think that we had quarrelled?"
she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her
friendly relations with Swann, and was planning an attempt to 'bring
them together.'

"He might be cross with you for never asking him here."

"One isn't obliged to ask everyone to one's house, you know; has he ever
asked me to his? I don't know his wife."

"But he used often to come, at Combray."

"I should think he did! He used to come at Combray, and now, in Paris,
he has something better to do, and so have I. 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 revelation 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-Elysees, 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 person 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 Gilberte, 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 str