deed
amusing herself in the way in which, with so unnatural an accomplice, a
girl might amuse herself who really did experience that savage antipathy
towards her father's memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of
wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was
so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself,
as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings
which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one
true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.

*****

If the 'Meseglise way' was so easy, it was a very different matter when
we took the 'Guermantes way,' for that meant a long walk, and we must
make sure, first, of the weather. When we seemed to have entered upon a
spell of fine days, when Francoise, in desperation that not a drop was
falling upon the 'poor crops,' gazing up at the sky and seeing there
only a little white cloud floating here and there upon its calm, azure
surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed: "You would say they were nothing
more nor less than a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their
snouts! Ah, they never think of making it rain a little for the poor
labourers! And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come,
rattling all over the place, and think no more of where it is falling
than if it was on the sea!"--when my father's appeals to the gardener
had met with the same encouraging answer several times in succession,
then some one would say, at dinner: "To-morrow, if the weather holds,
we might go the Guermantes way." And off we would set, immediately after
luncheon, through the little garden gate which dropped us into the Rue
des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with grass-plots
over which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street
as quaint as its name, from which its odd characteristics and its
personality were, I felt, derived; a street for which one might search
in vain through the Combray of to-day, for the public school now rises
upon its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects,
pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath
a Renaissance rood-loft and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a
Norman choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it probably
was in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice
standing, I pierce through it and 'restore' the Rue des Perchamps. And
for su