ling you whether it has rained. I live so
resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer
trouble to inform me of them."

"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out
of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As
if there could be anything more interesting! He is an imbecile."

Next, Bloch had displeased my grandmother because, after luncheon, when
she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and wiped
the tears from his eyes.

"You cannot imagine that he is sincere," she observed to me. "Why he
doesn't know me. Unless he's mad, of course."

And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an hour
and a half late for luncheon and covered with mud from head to foot, and
made not the least apology, saying merely: "I never allow myself to be
influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or
by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I would willingly
reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but
I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more
pernicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) implements, the
umbrella and the watch."

In spite of all this he would still have been received at Combray. He
was, of course, hardly the friend my parents would have chosen for
me; they had, in the end, decided that the tears which he had shed on
hearing of my grandmother's illness were genuine enough; but they
knew, either instinctively or from their own experience, that our early
impulsive emotions have but little influence over our later actions and
the conduct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty
to our friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule
of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly
followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They
would have preferred to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would
have given me no more than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class
morality, for boys to give one another, who would not unexpectedly
send me a basket of fruit because they happened, that morning, to have
thought of me with affection, but who, since they were incapable of
inclining in my favour, by any single impulse of their imagination and
emotions, the exact balance of the duties and claims of friendship, were
as incapable of loading the scal