ce me to outgrow the
need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different
thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional
kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look
displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a
moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held
it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might
drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to
sleep. But those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in
my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests
to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our 'guests'
were practically limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing
strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at
Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since
his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife)
and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat
in front of the house beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron
table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and
noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its
ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who
had put it out of action by coming in 'without ringing,' but the double
peal--timid, oval, gilded--of the visitors' bell, everyone would at once
exclaim "A visitor! Who in the world can it be?" but they knew quite
well that it could only be M. Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud
voice, to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound
natural, would tell the others not to whisper so; that nothing could be
more unpleasant for a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that
people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear; and
then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find
an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilise
to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or
two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother
might run her hand through her boy's hair, after the barber had smoothed
it down, to make it stick out properly round his head.

And there we would all stay, hanging on the words which would fall from
my grandmother's lips when she brought us back her report