n to the piano and lay out a sheet of music
so as to catch the eye. But as soon as they entered the room he had
snatched it away and hidden it in a corner. He was afraid, no doubt, of
letting them suppose that he was glad to see them only because it gave
him a chance of playing them some of his compositions. And every time
that my mother, in the course of her visit, had returned to the subject
of his playing, he had hurriedly protested: "I cannot think who put that
on the piano; it is not the proper place for it at all," and had turned
the conversation aside to other topics, simply because those were of
less interest to himself.

His one and only passion was for his daughter, and she, with her
somewhat boyish appearance, looked so robust that it was hard to
restrain a smile when one saw the precautions her father used to take
for her health, with spare shawls always in readiness to wrap around
her shoulders. My grandmother had drawn our attention to the gentle,
delicate, almost timid expression which might often be caught flitting
across the face, dusted all over with freckles, of this otherwise stolid
child. When she had spoken, she would at once take her own words in the
sense in which her audience must have heard them, she would be alarmed
at the possibility of a misunderstanding, and one would see, in clear
outline, as though in a transparency, beneath the mannish face of the
'good sort' that she was, the finer features of a young woman in tears.

When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before
the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of
almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed
that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour,
in which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste
of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mile.
Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the heavy, motionless
silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like
the murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was
quivering like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I
was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed
to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging
insects now transmuted into flowers.

Outside the church we would stand talking for a moment with M. Vinteuil,
in the porch. Boys would