Free In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

was going out, by a veil half raised, while upon them, brought there by the cold or some sad thought, an involuntary tear was always drying.
    My sole consolation, when I went upstairs for the night, was that Mama would come and kiss me once I was in bed. But this goodnight lasted so short a time, she went back down so soon, that the moment when I heard her coming up, then, passing along the hallway with its double doors, the soft sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, hung with little cords of plaited straw, was for me a painful moment. Itannounced the moment that would follow it, in which she had left me, in which she had gone back down. So that I came to wish this goodnight I loved so much would take place as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite in which Mama had not yet come. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I wanted to call her back, to say ‘kiss me one more time,’ but I knew that immediately her face would look vexed, because the concession she was making to my sadness and agitation by coming up to kiss me, by bringing me this kiss of peace, irritated my father, who found these rituals absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to lose the need for it, the habit of it, far indeed from allowing me to acquire that of asking her, when she was already on the doorstep, for one kiss more. And to see her vexed destroyed all the calm she had brought me a moment before, when she had bent her loving face down over my bed and held it out to me like a host for a communion of peace from which my lips would draw her real presence and the power to fall asleep. But those evenings, when Mama stayed so short a time altogether in my room, were still sweet compared to the ones when there were people for dinner and when, because of that, she did not come up to say goodnight to me. These people were usually limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few acquaintances passing through, was almost the only person who came to our house at Combray, sometimes for a neighbourly dinner (more rarely after that unfortunate marriage of his, because my parents did not want to receive his wife), sometimes after dinner, unexpectedly. The evenings when, sitting in front of the house under the large chestnut tree, around the iron table, we heard at the far end of the garden, not the copious high-pitched bell that drenched, that deafened in passing with its ferruginous, icy, inexhaustible noise any person in the household who set it off by coming in ‘without ringing’, but the shy, oval, golden double tinkling of the little visitors’ bell, everyone would immediately wonder: ‘A visitor – now who can that be?’ but we knew very well it could only be M. Swann; my great-aunt speaking loudly, to set an example, in a tone of voice that she strained to make natural, said not to whisper that way; that nothing is more disagreeable for a visitor just coming in who is led to think that people are saying things he should not hear; and they would send as a scout mygrandmother, who was always glad to have a pretext for taking one more walk around the garden and who would profit from it by surreptitiously pulling up a few rose stakes on the way in order to restore a little naturalness to the roses, like a mother who runs her hand through her son’s hair to fluff it up after the barber has flattened it too much.
    We would all remain hanging on the news my grandmother was going to bring us of the enemy, as though there had been a great number of possible assailants to choose among, and soon afterwards my grandfather would say: ‘I recognize Swann’s voice.’ In fact one could recognize him only by his voice, it was difficult to make out his face with its aquiline nose, its green eyes, under a high forehead framed by blond, almost red hair, cut Bressant-style, 2 because we kept as little light as possible in the garden so as not to attract mosquitoes, and I would go off,