It
was this mystery, too, which troubled me when, running at the sharp-voiced
girl's bidding, so as to begin our game without more delay, I saw
Gilberte, so quick and informal with us, make a ceremonious bow to the old
lady with the _Debats_ (who acknowledged it with "What a lovely sun!
You'd think there was a fire burning.") speaking to her with a shy smile,
with an air of constraint which called to my mind the other little girl
that Gilberte must be when at home with her parents, or with friends of
her parents, paying visits, in all the rest, that escaped me, of her
existence. But of that existence no one gave me so strong an impression as
did M. Swann, who came a little later to fetch his daughter. That was
because he and Mme. Swann--inasmuch as their daughter lived with them, as
her lessons, her games, her friendships depended upon them--contained for
me, like Gilberte, perhaps even more than Gilberte, as befitted subjects
that had an all-powerful control over her in whom it must have had its
source, an undefined, an inaccessible quality of melancholy charm.
Everything that concerned them was on my part the object of so constant a
preoccupation that the days on which, as on this day, M.
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