would have
replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed
site. 'But scarcely had daylight itself--and no longer the gleam from
a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for
daylight--traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across
a blackboard, its first white correcting ray, when the window, with
its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had
erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table,
which my memory had clumsily fixed where the window ought to be, would
hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and
sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would
be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had
lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the
darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I
had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight
by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted
forefinger of day.

SWANN IN LOVE

To admit you to the 'little nucleus,' the 'little group,' the 'little
clan' at the Verdurins', one condition sufficed, but that one was
indispensable; you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose
articles was that the young pianist, whom Mme. Verdurin had taken under
her patronage that year, and of whom she said "Really, it oughtn't to
be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!" left both Plante
and Rubinstein 'sitting'; while Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant
diagnostician than Potain. Each 'new recruit' whom the Verdurins failed
to persuade that the evenings spent by other people, in other houses
than theirs, were as dull as ditch-water, saw himself banished
forthwith. Women being in this respect more rebellious than men, more
reluctant to lay aside all worldly curiosity and the desire to find out
for themselves whether other drawing-rooms might not sometimes be as
entertaining, and the Verdurins feeling, moreover, that this critical
spirit and this demon of frivolity might, by their contagion, prove
fatal to the orthodoxy of the little church, they had been obliged to
expel, one after another, all those of the 'faithful' who were of the
female sex.

Apart from the doctor's young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively
that season (for all that Mme. Verdurin herself was a thoroughly 'good'
woman, and came of a respectable middle-class