While I waited I strolled up and down the road, past these modest gardens. If I raised my head I could see, now and then, girls sitting in the windows, but outside, in the open air, and at the height of a half-landing, here and there, light and pliant, in their fresh pink gowns, hanging among the leaves, young lilac-clusters were letting themselves be swung by the breeze without heeding the passerby who was turning his eyes towards their green mansions. I recognised in them the platoons in violet uniform posted at the entrance to M. Swann’s park, past the little white fence, in the warm afternoons of spring, like an enchanting rustic tapestry. I took a path which led me into a meadow. A cold wind blew keenly along it, as at Combray, but from the midst of the rich, moist, country soil, which might have been on the bank of the Vivonne, there had nevertheless arisen, punctual at the trysting place like all its band of brothers, a great white pear tree which waved smilingly in the sun’s face, like a curtain of light materialised and made palpable, its flowers shaken by the breeze but polished and frosted with silver by the sun’s rays.