In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [53]
“Look here, my boy, it’s time you were off,” said my uncle.
I rose. I had an irresistible desire to kiss the hand of the lady in pink, but I felt that to do so would require as much audacity as a forcible abduction. My heart beat loud while I repeated to myself “Shall I do it, shall I not?” and then I ceased to ask myself what I ought to do so as at least to do something. With a blind, insensate gesture, divested of all the reasons in its favour that I had thought of a moment before, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.
“Isn’t he delicious! Quite a ladies’ man already; he takes after his uncle. He’ll be a perfect ‘gentleman,’ ” she added, clenching her teeth so as to give the word a kind of English accentuation. “Couldn’t he come to me some day for ‘a cup of tea,’ as our friends across the Channel say? He need only send me a ‘blue’ in the morning?”
I had not the least idea what a “blue” might be.5 I did not understand half the words which the lady used, but my fear lest there should be concealed in them some question which it would be impolite of me not to answer made me keep on listening to them with close attention, and I was beginning to feel extremely tired.
“No, no, it’s impossible,” said my uncle, shrugging his shoulders. “He’s kept very busy, he works extremely hard. He brings back all the prizes from his school,” he added in a lower voice, so that I should not hear this falsehood and interrupt with a contradiction. “Who knows? he may turn out a little Victor Hugo, a kind of Vaulabelle, don’t you know.”
“Oh, I love artistic people,” replied the lady in pink. “There’s no one like them for understanding women. Apart from a few superior people like yourself. But please forgive my ignorance. Who or what is Vaulabelle? Is it those gilt books in the little glass case in your drawing-room? You know you promised to lend them to me. I’ll take great care of them.”
My uncle, who hated lending people books, said nothing, and ushered me out into the hall. Madly in love with the lady in pink, I covered my old uncle’s tobacco-stained cheeks with passionate kisses, and while with some embarrassment he gave me to understand without actually saying that he would rather I did not tell my parents about this visit, I assured him with tears in my eyes that his kindness had made so strong an impression upon me that some day I would most certainly find a way of expressing my gratitude. So strong an impression, indeed, had it made upon me that two hours later, after a string of mysterious utterances which did not strike me as giving my parents a sufficiently clear idea of the new importance with which I had been invested, I found it simpler to tell them in the minutest detail of the visit I had paid that afternoon. In doing this I had no thought of causing my uncle any unpleasantness. How could I have thought such a thing, since I did not wish it? And I could not suppose that my parents would see any harm in a visit in which I myself saw none. Every day of our lives does not some friend or other ask us to make his apologies, without fail, to some woman to whom he has been prevented from writing, and do not we forget to do so, feeling that this woman cannot attach much importance to a silence that has none for ourselves? I imagined, like everyone else, that the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles with no power of specific reaction to anything that might