But her parents were not content with singing the praises of Gilberte⁠—that same Gilberte, who, even before I had set eyes on her, used to appear to me standing before a church, in a landscape of the Île-de-France, and later, awakening in me not dreams now but memories, was embowered always in a hedge of pink hawthorn, in the little lane that I took when I was going the Méséglise way. Once when I had asked Mme. Swann (and had made an effort to assume the indifferent tone of a friend of the family, curious to know the preferences of a child), which among all her playmates Gilberte liked the best, Mme. Swann replied: “But you ought to know a great deal better than I do. You are in her confidence, her great favourite, her ‘chum’ as the English say.”