There is no reason for you to cry like that. Remember, your Mamma is going away to-day and can’t bear to leave her big baby in such a state. Especially, my poor boy, as I haven’t time to comfort you. Even if my things are packed, one has never any time on the morning of a journey.” “It is not that.” And then, calculating the future, weighing well my desires, realising that such an affection on Albertine’s part for Mlle.
Vinteuil’s friend, and one of such long standing, could not have been innocent, that Albertine had been initiated, and, as every one of her instinctive actions made plain to me, had moreover been born with a predisposition towards that vice which in my uneasiness I had only too often dreaded, in which she could never have ceased to indulge (in which she was indulging perhaps at that moment, taking advantage of an instant in which I was not present), I said to my mother, knowing the pain that I was causing her, which she did not shew, and which revealed itself only by that air of serious preoccupation which she wore when she was weighing the respective seriousness of making me unhappy or making me unwell, that air which she had assumed at Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night in my room, that air which at this moment was extraordinarily like my grandmother’s when she allowed me to drink brandy, I said to my mother: “I know how what I am going to say will distress you.
First of all, instead of remaining here as you wished, I want to leave by the same train as you. But that is nothing. I am not feeling well here, I would rather go home. But listen to me, don’t make yourself too miserable. This is what I want to say. I was deceiving myself, I deceived you in good faith, yesterday, I have been thinking over it all night. It is absolutely necessary, and let us decide the matter at once, because I am quite clear about it now in my own mind, because I shall not change again, and I could not live without it, it is absolutely necessary that I marry Albertine.”
The End
