een until that
moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen
'ducks,' whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed
to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded,
and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in
my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly.

And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a
talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom
its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a
moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen. So it came
to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and
cool as the drops which fell from the green watering-pipe; impregnating
and irradiating the zone of pure air through which it had passed, which
it set apart and isolated from all other air, with the mystery of the
life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy creatures that
lived and walked and travelled in her company; unfolding through the
arch of the pink hawthorn, which opened at the height of my shoulder,
the quintessence of their familiarity--so exquisitely painful to
myself--with her, and with all that unknown world of her existence, into
which I should never penetrate.

For a moment (while we moved away, and my grandfather murmured: "Poor
Swann, what a life they are leading him; fancy sending him away so
that she can be left alone with her Charlus--for that was Charlus: I
recognised him at once! And the child, too; at her age, to be mixed up
in all that!") the impression left on me by the despotic tone in which
Gilberte's mother had spoken to her, without her replying, by exhibiting
her to me as being obliged to yield obedience to some one else, as not
being indeed superior to the whole world, calmed my sufferings somewhat,
revived some hope in me, and cooled the ardour of my love. But very soon
that love surged up again in me like a reaction by which my humiliated
heart was endeavouring to rise to Gilberte's level, or to draw her down
to its own. I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the
inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep
some memory of me. I knew her to be so beautiful that I should have
liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and
shout, "I think you are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!"
However, I wal