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 now he has
died for her, 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 close beside her a little table on which
she placed the photograph, just as, long ago, M. Vinteuil had 'placed'
beside him the piece of music which he would have liked to play over to my
parents. And then her friend came in. Mlle.
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