, that I recognised her, for I had not seen her
often at Combray, and then only when she was still a child, whereas
she was now growing into a young woman), who probably had just come in,
standing in front of me, and only a few feet away from me, in that room
in which her father had entertained mine, and which she had now made
into a little sitting-room for herself. The window was partly open; the
lamp was lighted; I could watch her every movement without her being
able to see me; but, had I gone away, I must have made a rustling sound
among the bushes, she would have heard me, and might have thought that I
had been hiding there in order to spy upon her.

She was in deep mourning, for her father had but lately died. We had
not gone to see her; my mother had not cared to go, on account of that
virtue which alone in her fixed any bounds to her benevolence--namely,
modesty; but she pitied the girl from the depths of her heart. My
mother had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil's life, his complete
absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to his
daughter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him; she
could see the tortured expression which was never absent from the old
man's face in those terrible last years; she knew that he had definitely
abandoned the task of transcribing in fair copies the whole of his later
work, the poor little pieces, we imagined, of an old music-master, a
retired village organist, which, we assumed, were of little or no value
in themselves, though we did not despise them, because they were of such
great value to him and had been the chief motive of his life before he
sacrificed them to his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even
written down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were
scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain
unknown for ever; my mother thought, also, of that other and still more
cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of seeing
the girl happily settled, with an honest and respectable future; when
she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come
upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and
shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness,
which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having
virtually killed her father. "Poor M. Vinteuil," my mother would say,
"he lived for his daughter, and