be better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at
something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as
to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which
they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing
to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They
themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any
other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring
me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite
painter quite different from any of those that we already know, or,
better still, when some one has taken us and set us down in front of a
picture of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch,
or when a piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano
bursts out again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an
orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge
of Tansonville, said: "You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink
one; isn't it pretty?"

And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and
lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire, for one of
those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion,
because they are not appointed by any capricious accident, as secular
holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for
such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially
festal--but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the
flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to
leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about
the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them 'in colour,'
and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of
Combray, to the 'plain,' if one was to judge by the scale of prices
at the 'stores' in the Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive
biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. And for my own part I set a
higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed
to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen
precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some
exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours,
inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those
whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of chi