ng the boles of forest trees. But on some
days, though very rarely, the chest-of-drawers would long since have
shed its momentary adornments, there would no longer, as we turned into
the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from the western sky burning
along the line of window-panes; the pond beneath the Calvary would
have lost its fiery glow, sometimes indeed had changed already to an
opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken
and broadened by every ripple upon the water's surface, would be lying
across it, from end to end. Then, as we drew near the house, we would
make out a figure standing upon the doorstep, and Mamma would say to me:
"Good heavens! There is Francoise looking out for us; your aunt must be
anxious; that means we are late."

And without wasting time by stopping to take off our 'things' we would
fly upstairs to my aunt Leonie's room to reassure her, to prove to her
by our bodily presence that all her gloomy imaginings were false, that,
on the contrary, nothing had happened to us, but that we had gone the
'Guermantes way,' and, good lord, when one took that walk, my aunt knew
well enough that one could never say at what time one would be home.

"There, Francoise," my aunt would say, "didn't I tell you that they must
have gone the Guermantes way? Good gracious! They must be hungry! And
your nice leg of mutton will be quite dried up now, after all the hours
it's been waiting. What a time to come in! Well, and so you went the
Guermantes way?"

"But, Leonie, I supposed you knew," Mamma would answer. "I thought
that Francoise had seen us go out by the little gate, through the
kitchen-garden."

For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to
take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually
leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen:
the way towards Meseglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's
way,' because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M.
Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way.' Of Meseglise-la-Vineuse, to
tell the truth, I never knew anything more than the way there, and
the strange people who would come over on Sundays to take the air in
Combray, people whom, this time, neither my aunt nor any of us would
'know at all,' and whom we would therefore assume to be 'people who must
have come over from Meseglise.' As for Guermantes, I was to know it well
enough one day, but tha