Swann's Way

almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed
that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour,
in which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste
of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mlle.
Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the heavy, motionless
silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like
the murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was
quivering like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I
was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed
to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging
insects now transmuted into flowers.

Outside the church we would stand talking for a moment with M. Vinteuil,
in the porch. Boys would be chevying one another in the Square, and he
would interfere, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the
big. If his daughter said, in her thick, comfortable voice, how glad she
had been to see us, immediately it would seem as though some elder and
more sensitive sister, latent in her, had blushed at this thoughtless,
schoolboyish utterance, which had, perhaps, made us think that she was