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By Root 1226 0

expression which was never absent from the old man’s face in those last years; she knew that he had finally given up hope of finishing the task of copying out the whole of his later work, the modest pieces, we imagined, of an old piano-teacher, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little value in themselves, though we did not despise them because they meant so much 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, too, of that other and still more cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of a future of honourable and respected happiness for his daughter; when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts’ old music-teacher, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so much more bitter, 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 and died for his daughter, without getting his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only come to him from her.”

At the far end of Mlle Vinteuil’s sitting-room, on the mantelpiece, stood a small photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch, just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside, then flung herself down on a sofa and drew towards her a little table on which she placed the photograph, as M. Vinteuil had placed beside him the piece of music which he would have liked to play to my parents. Presently her friend came into the room. Mlle Vinteuil greeted her without rising, clasping her hands behind her head and moving to one side of the sofa as though to make room for her. But no sooner had she done this than she evidently felt that she might seem to be imposing on her friend a posture which she might consider importunate. She thought that her friend would perhaps prefer to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair; she felt that she had been indiscreet; her sensitive heart took fright; stretching herself out again over the whole of the sofa, she closed her eyes and began to yawn, as if to suggest that drowsiness was the sole reason for her recumbent position. Despite the brusque and hectoring familiarity with which she treated her companion, I could recognise in her the obsequious and reticent gestures and sudden scruples that had characterised her father. Presently she rose and came to the window, where she pretended to be trying to close the shutters and not succeeding.

“Leave them open,” said her friend. “I’m hot.”

“But it’s too tiresome! People will see us,” Mlle Vinteuil answered.

But then she must have guessed that her friend would think that she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she did indeed wish to hear but, from discretion, would have preferred her friend to be the first to speak. And so her face, which I could not see very clearly, must have assumed the expression which my grandmother had once found so delightful, when she hastily went on: “When I say ‘see us’ I mean, of course, see us reading. It’s so tiresome to think that whatever trivial little thing you do someone’s eyes are on you.”

With an instinctive rectitude and a gentility beyond her control, she refrained from uttering the premeditated words which she had felt to be indispensable for the full realisation of her desire. And perpetually, in the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden entreated and reined back a rough and swaggering trooper.

“Oh, yes, it’s so extremely likely that people are looking at us at this time of night in this densely populated district!” said her friend sarcastically. “And what if they are?” she went on, feeling bound to annotate with a fond and mischievous wink these words which she recited out of good-naturedness,