at great length with M. Vinteuil,
with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms, and
invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter over, one day,
to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation which, two years earlier,
would have enraged M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much
gratitude that he felt himself obliged to refrain from the indiscretion
of accepting. Swann's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to
be in itself so honourable, so precious a support for his cause that he
felt it would perhaps be better to make no use of it, so as to have the
wholly Platonic satisfaction of keeping it in reserve.

"What a charming man!" he said to us, after Swann had gone, with the
same enthusiasm and veneration which make clever and pretty women of the
middle classes fall victims to the physical and intellectual charms of a
duchess, even though she be ugly and a fool. "What a charming man! What
a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!"

And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most
sincere of men, who cast off, while they are talking to anyone, the
opinion they actually hold of him and will express when he is no longer
there, my family joined with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann's marriage,
invoking principles and conventions which (all the more because they
invoked them in common with him, as though we were all thorough good
fellows of the same sort) they appeared to suggest were in no way
infringed at Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil did not send his daughter to visit
Swann, an omission which Swann was the first to regret. For constantly,
after meeting M. Vinteuil, he would remember that he had been meaning
for a long time to ask him about some one of the same name as himself,
one of his relatives, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he determined
that he would not forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil
should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.

Since the 'Meseglise way' was the shorter of the two that we used to
take for our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for
days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Meseglise
shewed an unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the
fringe of Roussainville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for
shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves.

Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its
roundness, but whose edge the su