had yet accounted for my temptations in a way which might have led me to
believe that there was some excuse for my giving in to them, or that I was
actually incapable of holding out against them. Yet I could easily
recognise this class of transgressions by the anguish of mind which
preceded, as well as by the rigour of the punishment which followed them;
and I knew that what I had just done was in the same category as certain
other sins for which I had been severely chastised, though infinitely more
serious than they. When I went out to meet my mother as she herself came
up to bed, and when she saw that I had remained up so as to say good night
to her again in the passage, I should not be allowed to stay in the house
a day longer, I should be packed off to school next morning; so much was
certain. Very good: had I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself
out of the window, I should still have preferred such a fate. For what I
wanted now was Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far
along the road which led to the realisation of this desire to be able to
retrace my steps.

I could hear my parents' footsteps as they went with Swann; and, when the
rattle of the gate assured me that he had really gone, I crept to the
window. Mamma was asking my father if he had thought the lobster good, and
whether M. Swann had had some of the coffee-and-pistachio ice. "I thought
it rather so-so," she was saying; "next time we shall have to try another
flavour."

"I can't tell you," said my great-aunt, "what a change I find in Swann.
He is quite antiquated!" She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann
always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find
him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him. And the
others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive,
scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in one of that class for