1. Read the definitions. com = with ple = to complete pli = to be courteous,
The sentence that uses the underlined word correctly is: "She appreciated his effort and paid him a nice complement." What is the use of the word "complement" ?
Answer:C) The necklace was a perfect complement to her outfit.Explanation:
2. Identify which answer choice is a dependent clause. 1a. After she ...
The sentence that uses the underlined word correctly is: "She appreciated his effort and paid him a nice complement." What is the use of the word "complement" ?
The options that are or contain dependent clauses are "After she had...," "whose reaction was priceless," "...when I feed him" and "who lives in the basement."What
3. Read the definitions. com = with ple = to complete - Brainsanswers
Mar 5, 2023 · -ment = an action or object. Which sentence uses the underlined word correctly? The silk curtains were a nice compliment to the tall windows.
✅ answer: Read the definitions. com = with ple = to complete pli = to be courteous, to comply with -ment = an action or object Which, Dwould be the answer
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4. U5L1-Spell-Checker.xml - The Beauty and Joy of Computing
... its report. time in milliseconds Reports True iff the second item (a number) is equal to the number of letters in the first item (a word). Take any number ...
5. dictionary.txt - Washington
... appreciated appreciates appreciating appreciation appreciation's appreciations ... effort effort's effortless effortlessly efforts effusive effusively ...
AIDS AIDS's African African's Africans Allah Allah's American American's Americanism Americanism's Americanisms Americans April April's Aprils Asian Asian's Asians August August's Augusts B's British British's Britisher Brown C's CIA CIA's CO's CPA CPA's Catholic Catholic's Catholicism Catholicism's Catholicisms Catholics Celsius Celsius's Chicano Chicano's Christian Christian's Christianities Christianity Christianity's Christians Christmas Christmas's Christmases Congress D's DC's DDT DNA DNA's December December's Decembers Doctor Dutch Dutch's E's Easter Easter's Easters England English English's Englisher Englishes Eskimo Eskimo's Eskimos Europe European European's Europeans F's FBI FBI's FM's Fahrenheit Fahrenheit's Februaries February February's French Friday Friday's Fridays G's GNP GNP's GOP GOP's God Greek Greek's Greeks H's Halloween Halloween's Halloweens Hebrew Hebrew's Hebrews Hispanic Hispanic's Hispanics I I'm I's ID's IDs IOU IOU's IRS IRS's Indian Indian's Indians Islam Islam's Islamic Islamic's Islams Januaries January January's Jew Jew's Jewish Jewish's Jews John Judaism Judaism's Judaisms Julies July July's June June's Junes K's KO's Koran Koran's Korans LSD LSD's Latin Latin's Latiner Latins MA's MD's MI's MS's March March's Marches Marxism Marxism's Marxisms Marxist Marxist's Marxists May May's Mays Mister Monday Monday's Mondays Mr's Mrs Muslim Muslim's Muslims N's NE NE's NW's Nazi Nazi's Nazis Negro Negro's Negroes November November's Novembers O's OK's OKed OKing OKs October October's Octobers P's PA's Passover Passover's Passovers Protestant Protestant's Protestants S's SC's SOS SOS's SW's Sabbath Sabbath's Sabbaths Satan Satan's Saturday Saturday's Saturdays Scotch Scotch's Scotches September September's Septembers Sunday Sunday's Sundays T's TB's TNT TNT's TV TV's TVs Taurus Taurus's Tauruses Thursday Thursday's Thursdays Tuesday Tuesday's Tuesdays U's UFO UFO's UFOs UN's V's VCR VCR's VD's VIP VIP's VIPs W's Wednesday Wednesday's Wednesdays Xmas Xmas's Xmases Y's YMCA YMCA's YWCA YWCA's Yankee Yankee's Yankees Yiddish Yiddish's a aardvark aback abacus abacus's abacuses abandon abandoned abandoning abandonment abandonment's abandons abate abated abates abating abbey abbey's abbeys abbot abbot's abbots abbreviate abbreviated abbreviates abbreviating abbreviation abbreviation's abbreviations abdicate abdicated abdicates abdicating abdication abdication's abdications abdomen abdomen's abdomens abdominal abduct abducted abducting abducts aberration aberration's aberrations abet abets abetted abetting abhor abhorred abhorrence abhorrence's abhorrent abhorring abhors abide abides abiding abilities ability ability's abject ablaze able abler ablest ably abnormal abnormalities abnormality abnormality's abnormally aboard abode abode's abodes abolish abolished abolishes abolishing abolition abolition's abominable abomination aboriginal aborigine aborigine's aborigines abort aborted aborting abortion abortion's abortions 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academically academics academies academy academy's accede acceded accedes acceding accelerate accelerated accelerates accelerating acceleration acceleration's accelerations accelerator accelerator's accelerators accent accent's accented accenting accents accentuate accentuated accentuates accentuating accept acceptability acceptable acceptably acceptance acceptance's acceptances accepted accepting accepts access access's accessed accesses accessibility accessible accessing accessories accessory accessory's accident accident's accidental accidental's accidentally accidentals accidents acclaim acclaim's acclaimed acclaiming acclaims acclimate acclimated acclimates acclimating acclimatize acclimatized acclimatizes acclimatizing accolade accolade's accolades accommodate accommodated accommodates accommodating accommodation accommodation's accommodations accompanied accompanies accompaniment accompaniment's accompaniments accompanist accompanist's accompanists accompany accompanying accomplice accomplice's accomplices accomplish accomplished accomplishes accomplishing accomplishment accomplishment's accomplishments accord accord's accordance accordance's accorded according accordingly accordion accordion's accordions accords accost accost's accosted accosting accosts account account's accountability accountable accountancy accountant accountant's accountants accounted accounting accounting's accounts accredit accredited accrediting accredits accrue accrued accrues accruing accumulate accumulated accumulates accumulating accumulation accumulation's accumulations accuracy accuracy's accurate accurately accusation accusation's accusations accuse accused accuser accuser's accusers accuses accusing accustom accustomed accustoming accustoms ace ace's aced aces ache ache's ached aches achievable achieve achieved achievement achievement's achievements achieves achieving aching acid acid's acidity acidity's acids acing acknowledge acknowledged acknowledges acknowledging acknowledgment acknowledgment's acknowledgments acne acne's acorn acorn's acorns acoustic acoustics acoustics's acquaint acquaintance acquaintance's acquaintances acquainted acquainting acquaints acquiesce acquiesced acquiescence acquiescence's acquiesces acquiescing acquire acquired acquires acquiring acquisition acquisition's acquisitions acquit acquits acquittal acquittal's acquittals acquitted acquitting acre acre's acreage acreage's acreages acres acrid acrider acridest acrimonious acrimony acrimony's acrobat acrobat's acrobatic acrobatics acrobatics's acrobats acronym acronym's acronyms across acrylic acrylic's acrylics act act's acted acting acting's action action's actions activate activated activates activating active active's actively actives activist activist's activists activities activity activity's actor actor's actors actress actress's actresses acts actual actualities actuality actuality's actually actuary acumen acumen's acupuncture acupuncture's acute acute's acutely ad's adage adage's adages adamant adamant's adapt adaptable adaptation adaptation's adaptations adapted adapter adapting adaptive adapts add added addendum addict addict's addicted addicting addiction addiction's addictions addictive addicts adding addition addition's additional additionally additions additive additive's additives address address's addressed addressee addressee's addressees addresses addressing adds adept adept's adepts adequate adequately adhere adhered adherence adherence's adherent adherent's adherents adheres adhering adhesion adhesion's adhesive adhesive's adhesives adjacent adjective adjective's adjectives adjoin adjoined adjoining adjoins adjourn adjourned adjourning adjournment adjournment's adjournments adjourns adjunct adjunct's adjuncts adjust adjustable adjusted adjusting adjustment adjustment's adjustments adjusts administer administered administering administers administration administration's administrations administrative administrator administrator's administrators admirable admirably admiral admiral's admirals admiration admiration's admire admired admirer admirer's admirers admires admiring admissible admission admission's admissions admit admits admittance admittance's admitted admittedly admitting admonish admonished admonishes admonishing admonition admonition's admonitions ado ado's adobe adobe's adobes adolescence adolescence's adolescences adolescent adolescent's adolescents adopt adopted adopting adoption adoption's adoptions adopts adorable adoration adoration's adore adored adores adoring adorn adorned adorning adornment adornment's adornments adorns adrift adroit adroitly ads adulation adulation's adult adult's adulterate adulterated adulterates adulterating adulteration adulteration's adulteries adultery adultery's adulthood adulthood's adults advance advance's advanced advancement advancement's advancements advances advancing advantage advantage's advantaged advantageous advantages advantaging advent adventure adventure's adventured adventurer adventurer's adventurers adventures adventuring adventurous adverb adverb's adverbial adverbial's adverbials adverbs adversaries adversary adversary's adverse adversely adverser adversest adversities adversity adversity's advert advert's advertise advertised advertisement advertisement's advertisements advertiser advertiser's advertisers advertises advertising adverts advice advice's advisable advise advised adviser adviser's advisers advises advising advisories advisory advisory's advocate advocate's advocated advocates advocating aerial aerial's aerials aerodynamic aerodynamics aerodynamics's aerosol aerosol's aerosols aerospace aerospace's aesthetic aesthetically afar affable affably affair affair's affairs affect affect's affectation affectation's affectations affected affecting affection affection's affectionate affectionately affections affects affidavit affidavit's affidavits affiliate affiliate's affiliated affiliates affiliating affiliation affiliation's affiliations affinities affinity affinity's affirm affirmation affirmation's affirmations affirmative affirmative's affirmatives affirmed affirming affirms affix affix's affixed affixes affixing afflict afflicted afflicting affliction affliction's afflictions afflicts affluence affluence's affluent afford affordable afforded affording affords affront affront's affronted affronting affronts afield aflame afloat afoot aforementioned aforesaid afraid afresh after aftereffect aftereffect's aftereffects afterlife afterlife's afterlives aftermath aftermath's aftermaths afternoon afternoon's afternoons afterthought afterthought's afterthoughts afterward afterwards again against age age's aged agencies agency agency's agenda agenda's agendas agent agent's agents ages aggravate aggravated aggravates aggravating aggravation aggravation's aggravations aggregate aggregate's aggregated aggregates aggregating aggression aggression's aggressive aggressively aggressiveness aggressiveness's aggressor aggressor's aggressors aghast agile agility agility's aging agitate agitated agitates agitating agitation agitation's agitations agitator agitator's agitators aglow agnostic agnostic's agnosticism agnostics ago agonies agonize agonized agonizes agonizing agony agony's agree agreeable agreeably agreed agreeing agreement agreement's agreements agrees agricultural agriculture agriculture's aground ah ahead ahoy aid aid's aide aide's aided aides aiding aids ail ailed ailing ailment ailment's ailments ails aim aim's aimed aiming aimless aimlessly aims ain't air air's airborne aircraft aircraft's aired airfield airfield's airfields airier airiest airing airline airline's airliner airliner's airliners airlines airmail airmail's airmailed airmailing airmails airplane airplane's airplanes airport airport's airports airs airstrip airstrip's airstrips airtight airy aisle aisle's aisles ajar akin alarm alarm's alarmed alarming alarmingly alarmist alarmist's alarmists alarms alas albeit albino albino's albinos album album's albums alcohol alcohol's alcoholic alcoholic's alcoholics alcoholism alcoholism's alcohols alcove alcove's alcoves ale ale's alert alert's alerted alerting alerts ales alga alga's algae algebra algebra's algebraic algorithm algorithm's algorithms alias alias's aliased aliases aliasing alibi alibi's alibied alibiing alibis alien alien's alienate alienated alienates alienating alienation alienation's aliened aliening aliens alight alighted alighting alights align aligned aligning alignment alignment's alignments aligns alike alimony alimony's alive alkali alkali's alkalies alkaline all all's allay allayed allaying allays allegation allegation's allegations allege alleged allegedly alleges allegiance allegiance's allegiances alleging allegorical allegories allegory allegory's allergic allergies allergy allergy's alleviate alleviated alleviates alleviating alley alley's alleys alliance alliance's alliances allied allies alligator alligator's alligators allocate allocated allocates allocating allocation allocation's allocations allot allotment allotment's allotments allots allotted allotting allow allowable allowance allowance's allowances allowed allowing allows alloy alloy's alloyed alloying alloys allude alluded alludes alluding allure allure's allured allures alluring allusion allusion's allusions ally ally's allying almanac almanac's almanacs almighty almond almond's almonds almost alms alms's aloft alone along alongside aloof aloud alpha alphabet alphabet's alphabetic alphabetical alphabetically alphabets alphanumeric already also altar altar's altars alter alterable alteration alteration's alterations altered altering alternate alternate's alternated alternately alternates alternating alternation alternative alternative's alternatively alternatives alternator alters although altitude altitude's altitudes alto alto's altogether altos altruism altruism's altruistic aluminum aluminum's always am amalgamate amalgamated amalgamates amalgamating amalgamation amalgamation's amalgamations amass amassed amasses amassing amateur amateur's amateurish amateurs amaze amaze's amazed amazement amazement's amazes amazing amazingly ambassador ambassador's ambassadors amber amber's ambiance ambiance's ambiances ambidextrous ambient ambiguities ambiguity ambiguity's ambiguous ambiguously ambition ambition's ambitions ambitious ambitiously ambivalence ambivalence's ambivalent amble amble's ambled ambles ambling ambulance ambulance's ambulances ambush ambush's ambushed ambushes ambushing amen amenable amend amended amending amendment amendment's amendments amends amenities amenity amenity's amethyst amethyst's amethysts amiable amiably amicable amicably amid amiss ammonia ammonia's ammunition ammunition's amnesia amnesia's amnestied amnesties amnesty amnesty's amnestying amoeba amoeba's amoebae amoebas amok among amoral amorous amorphous amount amount's amounted amounting amounts amp amp's ampere ampere's amperes ampersand ampersand's ampersands amphetamine amphetamine's amphetamines amphibian amphibian's amphibians amphibious amphitheater amphitheater's amphitheaters ample ampler amplest amplification amplification's amplifications amplified amplifier amplifier's amplifiers amplifies amplify amplifying amplitude amply amps amputate amputated amputates amputating amputation amputation's amputations amulet amulet's amulets amuse amused amusement amusement's amusements amuses amusing amusingly an anachronism anachronism's anachronisms anagram anal analgesic analgesic's analgesics analog analogies analogous analogue analogy analogy's analyses analysis analysis's analyst analyst's analysts analytic analytical analyze analyzed analyzer analyzes analyzing anarchic anarchism anarchist anarchist's anarchists anarchy anarchy's anathema anatomical anatomies anatomy anatomy's ancestor ancestor's ancestors ancestral ancestries ancestry ancestry's anchor anchor's anchorage anchorage's anchorages anchored anchoring anchors anchovies anchovy anchovy's ancient ancient's ancienter ancientest ancients and android android's androids anecdote anecdote's anecdotes anemia anemia's anemic anesthesia anesthesia's anesthetic anesthetic's anesthetics anew angel angel's angelic angels anger anger's angered angering angers angle angle's angled angler angler's anglers angles angling angrier angriest angrily angry angst anguish anguish's anguished anguishes anguishing angular animal animal's animals animate animated animates animating animation animation's animations animosities animosity animosity's ankle ankle's ankles annals annals's annex annex's annexation annexation's annexations annexed annexes annexing annihilate annihilated annihilates annihilating annihilation annihilation's anniversaries anniversary anniversary's annotate annotated annotates annotating annotation annotation's annotations announce announced announcement announcement's announcements announcer announcer's announcers announces announcing annoy annoyance annoyance's annoyances annoyed annoying annoyingly annoys annual annual's annually annuals annuities annuity annuity's annul annulled annulling annulment annulment's annulments annuls anoint anointed anointing anoints anomalies anomalous anomaly anomaly's anon anonymity anonymity's anonymous anonymously anorak anorak's anoraks another answer answer's answerable answered answering answers ant ant's antagonism antagonism's antagonisms antagonist antagonist's antagonistic antagonists antagonize antagonized antagonizes antagonizing anteater anteater's anteaters antelope antelope's antelopes antenna antenna's antennae antennas anthem anthem's anthems anthill anthill's anthills anthologies anthology anthology's anthrax anthropological anthropologist anthropologist's anthropologists anthropology anthropology's antibiotic antibiotic's antibiotics antibodies antibody antibody's antic antic's anticipate anticipated anticipates anticipating anticipation anticipation's anticipations anticlimax anticlimax's anticlimaxes antics antidote antidote's antidotes antifreeze antifreeze's antipathies antipathy antipathy's antiquate antiquated antiquates antiquating antique antique's antiqued antiques antiquing antiquities antiquity antiquity's antiseptic antiseptic's antiseptics antisocial antitheses antithesis antithesis's antler antler's antlers antonym antonym's antonyms ants anus anus's anuses anvil anvil's anvils anxieties anxiety anxiety's anxious anxiously any anybodies anybody anybody's anyhow anyone anyone's anyplace anything anything's anythings anyway anywhere aorta aorta's aortas apart apartheid apartheid's apartment apartment's apartments apathetic apathy apathy's ape ape's aped aperture aperture's apertures apes apex apex's apexes aphorism aphorism's aphorisms apiece aping aplomb aplomb's apocryphal apologetic apologetically apologies apologize apologized apologizes apologizing apology apology's apostle apostle's apostles apostrophe apostrophe's apostrophes appall appalled appalling appallingly appalls apparatus apparatus's apparatuses apparel apparel's appareled appareling apparels apparent apparently apparition apparition's apparitions appeal appeal's appealed appealing appeals appear appearance appearance's appearances appeared appearing appears appease appeased appeasement appeasement's appeasements appeases appeasing append appendage appendage's appendages appended appendices appendicitis appendicitis's appending appendix appendix's appendixes appends appetite appetite's appetites appetizer appetizer's appetizers appetizing applaud applauded applauding applauds applause applause's apple apple's apples appliance appliance's appliances applicability applicable applicant applicant's applicants application application's applications applicator applicator's applicators applied applies apply applying appoint appointed appointee appointee's appointees appointing appointment appointment's appointments appoints apposite appraisal appraisal's appraisals appraise appraised appraises appraising appreciable appreciate appreciated appreciates appreciating appreciation appreciation's appreciations appreciative apprehend apprehended apprehending apprehends apprehension apprehension's apprehensions apprehensive apprentice apprentice's apprenticed apprentices apprenticeship apprenticeship's apprenticeships apprenticing approach approach's approachable approached approaches approaching appropriate appropriated appropriately appropriates appropriating appropriation appropriation's appropriations approval approval's approvals approve approved approves approving approximate approximated approximately approximates approximating approximation approximation's approximations apricot apricot's apricots apron apron's aprons apt apter aptest aptitude aptitude's aptitudes aptly aquamarine aquamarine's aquamarines aquarium aquarium's aquariums aquatic aquatic's aquatics aqueduct aqueduct's aqueducts arable arbiter arbiter's arbiters arbitrarily arbitrary arbitrate arbitrated arbitrates arbitrating arbitration arbitration's arbitrator arbitrator's arbitrators arbor arbor's arbors arc arc's arcade arcade's arcades arcane arced arch arch's archaeological archaeologist archaeologist's archaeologists archaeology archaeology's archaic archbishop archbishop's archbishops arched archer archer's archers archery archery's arches archest archetypal arching archipelago archipelago's archipelagos architect architect's architects architectural architecture architecture's architectures archive archive's archived archives archiving archway archway's archways arcing arcs ardent ardently ardor ardor's ardors arduous arduously are are's area area's areas aren't arena arena's arenas ares arguable arguably argue argued argues arguing argument argument's argumentative arguments aria aria's arias arid arise arisen arises arising aristocracies aristocracy aristocracy's aristocrat aristocrat's 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association's associations associative assort assorted assorting assortment assortment's assortments assorts assume assumed assumes assuming assumption assumption's assumptions assurance assurance's assurances assure assured assured's assureds assures assuring asterisk asterisk's asterisked asterisking asterisks asteroid asteroid's asteroids asthma asthma's astonish astonished astonishes astonishing astonishingly astonishment astonishment's astound astounded astounding astounds astray astride astringent astringent's astringents astrological astrology astrology's astronaut astronaut's astronauts astronomer astronomer's astronomers astronomical astronomy astronomy's astute astutely astuter astutest asylum asylum's asylums asymmetry asynchronous asynchronously at ate atheism atheism's atheist atheist's atheistic atheists athlete athlete's athletes athletic athletics athletics's atlas atlas's atlases atmosphere atmosphere's atmospheres atmospheric atom atom's atomic atoms atone atoned atonement atonement's atones atoning atrocious atrociously atrocities atrocity atrocity's attach attache attache's attached attaches attaching attachment attachment's attachments attack attack's attacked attacker attacking attacks attain attained attaining attainment attainment's attainments attains attempt attempt's attempted attempting attempts attend attendance attendance's attendances attendant attendant's attendants attended attending attends attention attention's attentions attentive attentively attest attested attesting attests attic attic's attics attire attire's attired attires attiring attitude attitude's attitudes attorney attorney's attorneys attract attracted attracting attraction attraction's attractions attractive attractiveness attracts attributable attribute attribute's attributed attributes attributing attribution attune attuned attunes attuning auburn auburn's auction auction's auctioned auctioneer auctioneer's auctioneers auctioning auctions audacious audacity audacity's audible audible's audibles audibly audience audience's audiences audio audio's audios audit audit's audited auditing audition audition's auditioned auditioning auditions auditor auditor's auditorium auditorium's auditoriums auditors auditory audits augment augmented augmenting augments august auguster augustest aunt aunt's aunts aura aura's aural auras auspicious austere austerer austerest austerities austerity austerity's authentic authentically authenticate authenticated authenticates authenticating authenticity authenticity's author author's authored authoring authoritarian authoritative authoritatively authorities authority authority's authorization authorization's authorizations authorize authorized authorizes authorizing authors authorship authorship's auto auto's autobiographical autobiographies autobiography autobiography's autocracies autocracy autocracy's autocrat autocrat's autocratic autocrats autograph autograph's autographed autographing autographs automate automated automates automatic automatic's automatically automatics automating automation automation's automobile automobile's automobiled automobiles automobiling automotive autonomous autonomy autonomy's autopsied autopsies autopsy autopsy's autopsying autos autumn autumn's autumnal autumns auxiliaries auxiliary auxiliary's avail avail's availability availability's available availed availing avails avalanche avalanche's avalanches avarice avarice's avaricious avenge avenged avenges avenging avenue avenue's avenues average average's averaged averages averaging averse aversion aversion's aversions avert averted averting averts aviation aviation's aviator aviator's aviators avid avocado avocado's avocados avoid avoidable avoidance avoidance's avoided avoiding avoids avow avowal avowal's avowals avowed avowing avows await awaited awaiting awaits awake awaken awakened awakening awakens awakes awaking award award's awarded awarding awards aware awareness awareness's away awe awe's awed awes awesome awful awfuller awfullest awfully awhile awing awkward awkwarder awkwardest awkwardly awkwardness awkwardness's awning awning's awnings awoke awoken awry ax ax's axed axes axing axiom axiom's axiomatic axioms axis axis's axle axle's axles aye aye's ayes azalea azalea's azaleas azure azure's azures babble babble's babbled babbles babbling babe babe's babes babied babier babies babiest baboon baboon's baboons baby baby's babying babyish bachelor bachelor's bachelors back back's backbone backbone's backbones backed backer backer's backers backfire backfire's backfired backfires backfiring backgammon backgammon's background background's backgrounds backhand backhand's backhanded backhanding backhands backing backing's backings backlash backlash's backlashes backlog backlog's backlogged backlogging backlogs backpack backpack's backpacked backpacking backpacks backs backside backslash backspace backstage backstage's backtrack backtracked backtracking backtracks backward backwards 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balm balm's balmier balmiest balms balmy baloney baloney's bamboo bamboo's bamboos bamboozle bamboozled bamboozles bamboozling ban ban's banal banana banana's bananas band band's bandage bandage's bandaged bandages bandaging bandanna bandanna's bandannas banded bandied bandier bandies bandiest banding bandit bandit's bandits bands bandstand bandstand's bandstands bandwagon bandwagon's bandwagons bandwidth bandy bandying bang bang's banged banging bangs bani banish banished banishes banishing banister banister's banisters banjo banjo's banjos bank bank's banked banker banker's bankers banking banking's banknote banknote's banknotes bankrupt bankrupt's bankruptcies bankruptcy bankruptcy's bankrupted bankrupting bankrupts banks banned banner banner's banners banning banquet banquet's banqueted banqueting banquets bans banter banter's bantered bantering banters baptism baptism's baptisms baptize baptized baptizes baptizing bar bar's barb barb's barbarian barbarian's barbarians barbaric barbarous barbecue barbecue's barbecued barbecues barbecuing barbed barber barber's barbered barbering barbers barbing barbiturate barbiturate's barbiturates barbs bard bard's bards bare bareback bared barefoot barely barer bares barest bargain bargain's bargained bargainer bargaining bargains barge barge's barged barges barging baring baritone baritone's baritones bark bark's barked barking barks barley barley's barman barn barn's barnacle barnacle's barnacles barns barnyard barnyard's barnyards barometer barometer's barometers baron baron's barons baroque barrage barrage's barraged barrages barraging barred barrel barrel's barreled barreling barrels barren barren's barrener barrenest barrens barrette barrette's barrettes barricade barricade's barricaded barricades barricading barrier barrier's barriers barring barrings barrister barrister's barristers bars bartender bartender's bartenders barter barter's bartered bartering barters base base's baseball baseball's baseballs based baseline basement basement's basements baser bases basest bash bash's bashed bashes bashful bashing basic basic's basically basics basil basil's basin basin's basing basins basis basis's bask basked basket basket's basketball basketball's basketballs baskets basking basks bass bass's basses bassoon bassoon's bassoons bastard bastard's bastards baste basted bastes basting bat bat's batch batch's batched batches batching bath bath's bathe bathe's bathed bathes bathing bathroom bathroom's bathrooms baths bathtub bathtub's bathtubs baton baton's batons bats batsman battalion battalion's battalions batted batter batter's battered batteries battering batters battery battery's batting battle battle's battled battlefield battlefield's battlefields battles battleship battleship's battleships battling baud baud's bawdier bawdiest bawdy bawl bawl's bawled bawling bawls bay bay's bayed baying bayonet bayonet's bayoneted bayoneting bayonets bayou bayou's bayous bays bazaar bazaar's bazaars be beach beach's beached beaches beaching beacon beacon's beacons bead bead's beaded beadier beadiest beading beads beady beagle beagle's beagles beak beak's beaked beaker beaker's beakers beaks beam beam's beamed beaming beams bean bean's beaned beaning beans bear bear's bearable beard beard's bearded bearding beards bearer bearer's bearers bearing bearing's bearings bears beast beast's beasts beat beat's beaten beater beater's beaters beating beats beautician beautician's beauticians beauties beautified beautifies beautiful beautifully beautify beautifying beauty beauty's beaver beaver's beavered beavering beavers became because beckon beckoned beckoning beckons become becomes becoming bed bed's bedbug bedbug's bedbugs bedclothes bedclothes's bedded bedder bedding bedding's bedlam bedlam's bedlams bedridden bedrock bedrock's bedrocks bedroom bedroom's bedrooms beds bedside bedside's bedsides bedspread bedspread's bedspreads bedtime bedtime's bedtimes bee bee's beech beech's beeches beef beef's beefed beefier beefiest beefing beefs beefy beehive beehive's beehives been beeper beer beer's beers bees beeswax beeswax's beet beet's beetle beetle's beetled beetles beetling beets beeves befall befallen befalling befalls befell befit befits befitted befitting before beforehand befriend befriended befriending befriends beg began beggar beggar's beggared beggaring beggars begged begging begin beginner beginner's beginners beginning beginning's beginnings begins begrudge begrudged begrudges begrudging begs beguile beguiled beguiles beguiling begun behalf behalf's behalves behave behaved behaves behaving behavior behavior's behavioral behead beheaded beheading beheads beheld behind behind's behinds behold beholder beholding beholds beige beige's being being's beings belabor belabored belaboring belabors belated belatedly belch belch's belched belches belching belfries belfry belfry's belie belied belief belief's beliefs belies believable believe believed believer believer's believers believes believing belittle belittled belittles belittling bell bell's bellboy bellboy's bellboys belled bellhop bellhop's bellhops bellied bellies belligerent belligerent's belligerents belling bellow bellow's bellowed bellowing bellows bells belly belly's bellying belong belonged belonging belonging's belongings belongs beloved beloved's beloveds below belt belt's belted belting belts belying bemoan bemoaned bemoaning bemoans bemuse bemused bemuses bemusing bench bench's benched benches benching bend bend's bender bending bends beneath benediction benediction's benedictions benefactor benefactor's benefactors beneficial beneficiaries beneficiary beneficiary's benefit benefit's benefited benefiting benefits benevolence benevolence's benevolences benevolent benighted benign bent bent's bents bequeath bequeathed bequeathing bequeaths bequest bequest's bequests bereave bereaved bereavement bereavement's bereavements bereaves bereaving bereft beret beret's berets berried berries berry berry's berrying berserk berth berth's berthed berthing berths beseech beseeches beseeching beset besets besetting beside besides besiege besieged besieges besieging besought best best's bested bestial bestiality besting bestow bestowed bestowing bestows bests bet bet's beta betcha betray betrayal betrayal's betrayals betrayed betraying betrays betrothal betrothal's betrothals bets better better's bettered bettering betterment betterment's betters betting bettor bettor's bettors between beverage beverage's beverages beware bewared bewares bewaring bewilder bewildered bewildering bewilderment bewilderment's bewilders bewitch bewitched bewitches bewitching beyond bias bias's biased biases biasing bib bib's bible biblical bibliographic bibliographies bibliography bibliography's bibs bicentennial bicentennial's bicentennials bicker bicker's bickered bickering bickers bicycle bicycle's bicycled bicycles bicycling bid bid's bidden bidding bide bides biding bids biennial biennial's biennials bifocals bifocals's big bigamist bigamist's bigamists bigamous bigamy bigamy's bigger biggest bigot bigot's bigoted bigotry bigots bike bike's biked bikes biking bikini bikini's bikinis bilateral bile bile's bilingual bilingual's bilinguals bill bill's billboard billboard's billboards billed billfold billfold's billfolds billiards billiards's billing billion billion's billions billow billow's billowed billowing billows bills bin bin's binaries binary binary's bind bind's binder binder's binders binding binding's bindings binds bingo bingo's binned binning binomial bins biochemical biochemistry biochemistry's biodegradable biographer biographer's biographers biographical biographies biography biography's biological biologically biologist biologist's biologists biology biology's bipartisan biped biped's bipeds biplane biplane's biplanes birch birch's birched birches birching bird bird's birdcage birdcages birded birding birds birth birth's birthday birthday's birthdays birthed birthing birthmark birthmark's birthmarks birthplace birthplace's birthplaces births biscuit biscuit's biscuits bisect bisected bisecting bisects bisexual bisexual's bisexuals bishop bishop's bishops bison bison's bit bit's bitch bitch's bitched bitches bitching bite bite's bites biting bitmap bits bitten bitter bitter's bitterer bitterest bitterly bitterness bitterness's bittersweet bittersweet's bittersweets bizarre blab blab's blabbed blabbing blabs black black's blackberries blackberry blackberry's blackberrying blackbird blackbird's blackbirds blackboard blackboard's blackboards blacked blacken blackened blackening blackens blacker blackest blackhead blackhead's blackheads blacking blackjack blackjack's blackjacked blackjacking blackjacks blacklist blacklist's blacklisted blacklisting blacklists blackmail blackmail's blackmailed blackmailer blackmailer's blackmailers blackmailing blackmails blackout blackout's blackouts blacks blacksmith blacksmith's blacksmiths blacktop blacktop's blacktopped blacktopping blacktops bladder bladder's bladders blade blade's blades blame blame's blamed blameless blamer blames blaming blanch blanched blanches blanching blancmange bland blander blandest blank blank's blanked blanker blankest blanket blanket's blanketed blanketing blankets blanking blankly blanks blare blare's blared blares blaring blase blaspheme blasphemed blasphemes blasphemies blaspheming blasphemous blasphemy blasphemy's blast blast's blasted blaster blasting blasts blatant blatantly blaze blaze's blazed blazer blazer's blazers blazes blazing bleach bleach's bleached bleaches bleaching bleak bleaker bleakest blearier bleariest bleary bleat bleat's bleated bleating bleats bled bleed bleeding bleeds blemish blemish's blemished blemishes blemishing blend blend's blended blending blends bless blessed blesses blessing blessing's blessings blew blight blight's blighted blighting blights blimp blimp's blimps blind blind's blinded blinder blindest blindfold blindfold's blindfolded blindfolding blindfolds blinding blindingly blindly blindness blindness's blinds blink blink's blinked blinker blinkered blinkering blinkers blinking blinks blip blip's blips bliss bliss's blissful blissfully blister blister's blistered blistering blisters blithe blithely blither blithest blitz blitz's blitzed blitzes blitzing blizzard blizzard's blizzards blob blob's blobbed blobbing blobs bloc bloc's block block's blockade blockade's blockaded blockades blockading blockage blockbuster blockbuster's blockbusters blocked blockhead blockhead's blockheads blocking blocks blocs blog blog's blogged blogger blogger's bloggers blogging blogs blond blond's blonde blonde's blonder blondes blondest blonds blood blood's blooded bloodhound bloodhound's bloodhounds bloodied bloodier bloodies bloodiest blooding bloods bloodshed bloodshed's bloodshot bloodstream bloodthirstier bloodthirstiest bloodthirsty bloody bloodying bloom bloom's bloomed blooming blooms blossom blossom's blossomed blossoming blossoms blot blot's blotch blotch's blotched blotches blotching blots blotted blotter blotter's blotters blotting blouse blouse's bloused blouses blousing blow blow's blowing blown blowout blowout's blowouts blows blowtorch blowtorch's blowtorches blubber blubber's blubbered blubbering blubbers bludgeon bludgeon's bludgeoned bludgeoning bludgeons blue blue's bluebell bluebell's bluebells blueberries blueberry blueberry's bluebird bluebird's bluebirds blued bluegrass bluegrass's blueprint blueprint's blueprinted blueprinting blueprints bluer blues bluest bluff bluff's bluffed bluffer bluffest bluffing bluffs bluing blunder blunder's blundered blundering blunders blunt blunted blunter bluntest blunting bluntly bluntness bluntness's blunts blur blur's blurb blurred blurring blurs blurt blurted blurting blurts blush blush's blushed blushes blushing bluster bluster's blustered blustering blusters boa boa's boar boar's board board's boarded boarder boarder's boarders boarding boards boardwalk boardwalk's boardwalks boars boas boast boast's boasted boastful boastfully boasting boasts boat boat's boated boating boats bob bob's bobbed bobbin bobbin's bobbing bobbins bobcat bobcat's bobcats bobs bobsled bobsled's bobsledded bobsledding bobsleds bode boded bodes bodice bodice's bodices bodies bodily boding body body's bodyguard bodyguard's bodyguards bodywork bog bog's bogged bogging boggle boggled boggles boggling bogs bogus boil boil's boiled boiler boiler's boilers boiling boils boisterous bold bolder boldest boldly boldness boldness's bologna bologna's bolster bolster's bolstered bolstering bolsters bolt bolt's bolted bolting bolts bomb bomb's bombard bombarded bombarding bombardment bombardment's bombardments bombards bombed bomber bomber's bombers bombing bombings bombs bond bond's bondage bondage's bonded bonding bonds bone bone's boned bones bonfire bonfire's bonfires bonier boniest boning bonnet bonnet's bonnets bonus bonus's bonuses bony boo boo's booby booed booing book book's bookcase bookcase's bookcases booked bookend bookend's bookends booking booking's bookings bookkeeper bookkeeper's bookkeepers bookkeeping bookkeeping's booklet booklet's booklets bookmark bookmark's bookmarked bookmarking bookmarks books bookshelf bookshop bookshop's bookshops bookstore bookworm bookworm's bookworms boom boom's boomed boomerang boomerang's boomeranged boomeranging boomerangs booming booms boon boon's boons boor boor's boorish boors boos boost boost's boosted booster booster's boosters boosting boosts boot boot's booted bootee bootee's bootees booth booth's booths booties booting bootleg bootleg's bootlegged bootlegging bootlegs boots bootstrap booty booty's booze bop border border's bordered bordering borderline borderline's borderlines borders bore bore's bored boredom boredom's bores boring boringly born borne borough borough's boroughs borrow borrowed borrowing borrows bosom bosom's bosoms boss boss's bossed bosses bossier bossiest bossing bossy botanical botanist botanist's botanists botany botany's botch botch's botched botches botching both bother bother's bothered bothering bothers bothersome bottle bottle's bottled bottleneck bottleneck's bottlenecks bottles bottling bottom bottom's bottomed bottoming bottomless bottoms bough bough's boughs bought boulder boulder's boulders boulevard boulevard's boulevards bounce bounce's bounced bounces bouncing bound bound's boundaries boundary boundary's bounded bounding boundless bounds bounties bountiful bounty bounty's bouquet bouquet's bouquets bourbon bourbon's bourgeois bourgeois's bourgeoisie bourgeoisie's bout bout's boutique boutique's boutiques bouts bovine bovine's bovines bow bow's bowed bowel bowel's bowels bowing bowl bowl's bowled bowlegged bowler bowling bowling's bowls bows box box's boxcar boxcar's boxcars boxed boxer boxer's boxers boxes boxing boxing's boy boy's boycott boycott's boycotted boycotting boycotts boyfriend boyfriend's boyfriends boyhood boyhood's boyhoods boyish boys bra bra's brace brace's braced bracelet bracelet's bracelets braces bracing bracket bracket's bracketed bracketing brackets brackish brag brag's braggart braggart's braggarts bragged bragging brags braid braid's braided braiding braids brain brain's brained brainier brainiest braining brainless brains brainstorm brainstorm's brainstormed brainstorming brainstorms brainwash brainwashed brainwashes brainwashing brainy braise braised braises braising brake brake's braked brakes braking bran bran's branch branch's branched branches branching brand brand's branded brandied brandies branding brandish brandished brandishes brandishing brands brandy brandy's brandying bras brash brasher brashest brass brass's brasses brassier brassiere brassiere's brassieres brassiest brassy brat brat's brats bravado bravado's brave brave's braved bravely braver bravery bravery's braves bravest braving bravo bravo's bravos brawl brawl's brawled brawling brawls brawn brawn's brawnier brawniest brawny bray bray's brayed braying brays brazen brazened brazening brazens brazier brazier's braziers breach breach's breached breaches breaching bread bread's breaded breading breads breadth breadth's breadths breadwinner breadwinner's breadwinners break break's breakable breakable's breakables breakdown breakdown's breakdowns breakfast breakfast's breakfasted breakfasting breakfasts breaking breakneck breakpoints breaks breakthrough breakthrough's breakthroughs breakwater breakwater's breakwaters breast breast's breasted breasting breasts breath breath's breathe breathed breather breather's breathers breathes breathing breathless breaths breathtaking bred breed breed's breeder breeder's breeders breeding breeding's breeds breeze breeze's breezed breezes breezier breeziest breezing breezy brethren brevity brevity's brew brew's brewed breweries brewery brewery's brewing brews bribe bribe's bribed bribery bribery's bribes bribing brick brick's bricked bricking bricklayer bricklayer's bricklayers bricks bridal bridal's bridals bride bride's bridegroom bridegroom's bridegrooms brides bridesmaid bridesmaid's bridesmaids bridge bridge's bridged bridges bridging bridle bridle's bridled bridles bridling brief brief's briefcase briefcase's briefcases briefed briefer briefest briefing briefly briefs brigade brigade's brigades bright brighten brightened brightening brightens brighter brightest brightly brightness brightness's brilliance brilliance's brilliant brilliant's brilliantly brilliants brim brim's brimmed brimming brims brimstone brine brine's bring bringing brings brinier briniest brink brink's brinks briny brisk brisked brisker briskest brisking briskly brisks bristle bristle's bristled bristles bristling britches britches's brittle brittle's brittler brittlest broach broach's broached broaches broaching broad broad's broadcast broadcast's broadcasting broadcasts broaden broadened broadening broadens broader broadest broadly broads broadside broadside's broadsided broadsides broadsiding brocade brocade's brocaded brocades brocading broccoli broccoli's brochure brochure's brochures broil broil's broiled broiler broiler's broilers broiling broils broke broken broker broker's brokered brokering brokers bronchitis bronchitis's bronco bronco's broncos bronze bronze's bronzed bronzes bronzing brooch brooch's brooches brood brood's brooded brooding broods brook brook's brooked brooking brooks broom broom's brooms broth broth's brother brother's brotherhood brotherhood's brotherhoods brotherly brothers broths brought brow brow's browbeat browbeaten browbeating browbeats brown brown's browned browner brownest brownie brownie's brownies browning browns brows browse browse's browsed browses browsing bruise bruise's bruised bruises bruising brunch brunch's brunched brunches brunching brunette brunette's brunettes brunt brunt's brush brush's brushed brushes brushing brusque brusquer brusquest brutal brutalities brutality brutality's brutally brute brute's brutes brutish bubble bubble's bubbled bubbles bubblier bubbliest bubbling bubbly bubbly's buck buck's bucked bucket bucket's bucketed bucketing buckets bucking buckle buckle's buckled buckles buckling bucks bud bud's budded buddies budding buddy buddy's budge budged budges budget budget's budgeted budgeting budgets budging buds buff buff's buffalo buffalo's buffaloed buffaloes buffaloing buffed buffer buffer's buffered buffering buffers buffet buffet's buffeted buffeting buffets buffing buffoon buffoon's buffoons buffs bug bug's bugged bugger bugger's buggers buggier buggies buggiest bugging buggy buggy's bugle bugle's bugled bugler bugler's buglers bugles bugling bugs build build's builder builder's builders building building's buildings builds built bulb bulb's bulbous bulbs bulge bulge's bulged bulges bulging bulk bulk's bulked bulkier bulkiest bulking bulks bulky bull bull's bulldog bulldog's bulldogged bulldogging bulldogs bulldoze bulldozed bulldozer bulldozer's bulldozers bulldozes bulldozing bulled bullet bullet's bulletin bulletin's bulletined bulletining bulletins bullets bullfight bullfight's bullfighter bullfighter's bullfighters bullfights bullfrog bullfrog's bullfrogs bullied bullies bulling bullion bullion's bulls bully bully's bullying bum bum's bumblebee bumblebee's bumblebees bummed bummer bummest bumming bump bump's bumped bumper bumper's bumpers bumpier bumpiest bumping bumps bumpy bums bun bun's bunch bunch's bunched bunches bunching bundle bundle's bundled bundles bundling bung bungalow bungalow's bungalows bungle bungle's bungled bungler bungler's bunglers bungles bungling bunion bunion's bunions bunk bunk's bunked bunker bunker's bunkers bunking bunks bunnies bunny bunny's buns buoy buoy's buoyancy buoyancy's buoyant buoyed buoying buoys burble burbled burbles burbling burden burden's burdened burdening burdens burdensome bureau bureau's bureaucracies bureaucracy bureaucracy's bureaucrat bureaucrat's bureaucratic bureaucrats bureaus burger burger's burgers burglar burglar's burglaries burglars burglary burglary's burgle burial burial's burials buried buries burlap burlap's burlier burliest burly burn burn's burned burner burner's burners burning burnish burnish's burnished burnishes burnishing burns burnt burp burp's burped burping burps burr burr's burred burring burro burro's burros burrow burrow's burrowed burrowing burrows burrs bursar burst burst's bursting bursts bury burying bus bus's bused buses bush bush's bushed bushel bushel's busheled busheling bushels bushes bushier bushiest bushing bushy busied busier busies busiest busily business business's businesses businessman businessman's businessmen businesswoman businesswoman's businesswomen busing buss buss's bust bust's busted busting bustle bustle's bustled bustles bustling busts busy busybodies busybody busybody's busying but butcher butcher's butchered butcheries butchering butchers butchery butchery's butler butler's butlers buts butt butt's butte butte's butted butter butter's buttercup buttercup's buttercups buttered butterflied butterflies butterfly butterfly's butterflying buttering buttermilk buttermilk's butters butterscotch butterscotch's buttery buttes butting buttock buttock's buttocks button button's buttoned buttonhole buttonhole's buttonholed buttonholes buttonholing buttoning buttons buttress buttress's buttressed buttresses buttressing butts buxom buy buy's buyer buyer's buyers buying buys buzz buzz's buzzard buzzard's buzzards buzzed buzzer buzzer's buzzers buzzes buzzing by by's bye bye's byes bygone bygone's bygones bypass bypass's bypassed bypasses bypassing bystander bystander's bystanders byte byte's bytes byway byway's byways cab cab's cabaret cabaret's cabarets cabbage cabbage's cabbages cabbed cabbing cabin cabin's cabinet cabinet's cabinets cabins cable cable's cabled cables cabling caboose caboose's cabooses cabs cacao cacao's cacaos cache cache's cached caches caching cackle cackle's cackled cackles cackling cacti cactus cactus's cad caddie caddie's caddied caddies caddying cadence cadence's cadences cadet cadet's cadets cafe cafe's cafes cafeteria cafeteria's cafeterias caffeine caffeine's cage cage's caged cages cagey cagier cagiest caging cajole cajoled cajoles cajoling cake cake's caked cakes caking calamities calamity calamity's calcium calcium's calculate calculated calculates calculating calculation calculation's calculations calculator calculator's calculators calculi calculus calculus's calendar calendar's calendared calendaring calendars calf calf's caliber caliber's calibers calibrate calibrated calibrates calibrating calibration calibration's calibrations calico calico's calicoes calk calk's calked calking calks call call's callable called caller caller's callers calligraphy calligraphy's calling calling's callings callous calloused callouses callousing callow calls callus callus's callused calluses callusing calm calm's calmed calmer calmest calming calmly calmness calmness's calms calorie calorie's calories calve calves cam camaraderie camaraderie's came camel camel's camels cameo cameo's cameos camera camera's cameras camouflage camouflage's camouflaged camouflages camouflaging camp camp's campaign campaign's campaigned campaigner campaigner's campaigners campaigning campaigns camped camper camper's campers camping camps campus campus's campuses can can's can't canal canal's canals canaries canary canary's cancel canceled canceling cancellation cancellation's cancellations cancels cancer cancer's cancers candid candidacies candidacy candidacy's candidate candidate's candidates candidly candied candies candle candle's candled candles candlestick candlestick's candlesticks candling candor candor's candy candy's candying cane cane's caned canes canine canine's canines caning canister canister's canisters canker canker's cankered cankering cankers canned canneries cannery cannery's cannibal cannibal's cannibalism cannibalism's cannibals cannier canniest canning cannon cannon's cannoned cannoning cannons cannot canny canoe canoe's canoed canoeing canoes canon canon's canonical canons canopied canopies canopy canopy's canopying cans cant cantaloupe cantaloupe's cantaloupes cantankerous canteen canteen's canteens canter canter's cantered cantering canters canvas canvas's canvased canvases canvasing canvass canvass's canvassed canvasser canvasser's canvassers canvasses canvassing canyon canyon's canyons cap cap's capabilities capability capability's capable capably capacitance capacities capacitor capacitor's capacitors capacity capacity's cape cape's caped caper caper's capered capering capers capes capillaries capillary capillary's capital capital's capitalism capitalism's capitalist capitalist's capitalists capitalization capitalization's capitalize capitalized capitalizes capitalizing capitals capitulate capitulated capitulates capitulating capped capping caprice caprice's caprices capricious capriciously caps capsize capsized capsizes capsizing capsule capsule's capsuled capsules capsuling captain captain's captained captaining captains caption caption's captioned captioning captions captivate captivated captivates captivating captive captive's captives captivities captivity captivity's captor captor's captors capture capture's captured captures capturing car car's caramel caramel's caramels carat carat's carats caravan caravan's caravans carbohydrate carbohydrate's carbohydrates carbon carbon's carbons carburetor carburetor's carburetors carcass carcass's carcasses carcinogenic card card's cardboard cardboard's carded cardiac cardigan cardigan's cardigans cardinal cardinal's cardinals carding cards care care's cared career career's careered careering careers carefree careful carefuller carefullest carefully carefulness carefulness's careless carelessly carelessness carelessness's cares caress caress's caressed caresses caressing caretaker caretaker's caretakers cargo cargo's cargoes caribou caribou's caribous caricature caricature's caricatured caricatures caricaturing caring carnage carnage's carnal carnation carnation's carnations carnival carnival's carnivals carnivore carnivore's carnivores carnivorous carol carol's caroled caroling carols carouse carouse's caroused carouses carousing carp carp's carped carpenter carpenter's carpentered carpentering carpenters carpentry carpentry's carpet carpet's carpeted carpeting carpets carping carps carriage carriage's carriages carriageway carried carrier carrier's carriers carries carrion carrion's carrot carrot's carrots carry carry's carrying cars cart cart's carted cartel cartel's cartels cartilage cartilage's cartilages carting cartographer cartographer's cartographers cartography cartography's carton carton's cartons cartoon cartoon's cartooned cartooning cartoonist cartoonist's cartoonists cartoons cartridge cartridge's cartridges carts cartwheel cartwheel's cartwheeled cartwheeling cartwheels carve carved carves carving cascade cascade's cascaded cascades cascading case case's cased cases cash cash's cashed cashes cashew cashew's cashews cashier cashier's cashiered cashiering cashiers cashing cashmere cashmere's casing casing's casings casino casino's casinos cask cask's casket casket's caskets casks casserole casserole's casseroled casseroles casseroling cassette cassette's cassettes cast cast's castaway castaway's castaways caste caste's caster caster's casters castes castigate castigated castigates castigating casting casting's castings castle castle's castled castles castling castoff castoff's castoffs castrate castrated castrates castrating casts casual casual's casually casuals casualties casualty casualty's cat cat's cataclysm cataclysm's cataclysmic cataclysms catalog catalog's cataloged cataloging catalogs catapult catapult's catapulted catapulting catapults cataract cataract's cataracts catastrophe catastrophe's catastrophes catastrophic catcall catcall's catcalled catcalling catcalls catch catch's catches catchier catchiest catching catchings catchment catchy catechism catechism's catechisms categorical categorically categories categorize categorized categorizes categorizing category category's cater catered caterer caterer's caterers catering caterpillar caterpillar's caterpillars caters catfish catfish's catfishes cathedral cathedral's cathedrals catholic catnap catnap's catnapped catnapping catnaps catnip catnip's cats cattle cattle's catwalk catwalk's catwalks caucus caucus's caucused caucuses caucusing caught cauliflower cauliflower's cauliflowers caulk caulk's caulked caulking caulks causal causality cause cause's caused causes causeway causeway's causeways causing caustic caustic's caustics caution caution's cautioned cautioning cautions cautious cautiously cavalier cavalier's cavaliers cavalries cavalry cavalry's cave cave's caveat caveat's caveats caved cavern cavern's caverns caves caviar caviar's caving cavities cavity cavity's cavort cavorted cavorting cavorts caw caw's cawed cawing caws cease cease's ceased ceasefire ceaseless ceaselessly ceases ceasing cedar cedar's cedars cede ceded cedes ceding ceiling ceiling's ceilings celebrate celebrated celebrates celebrating celebration celebration's celebrations celebrities celebrity celebrity's celery celery's celestial celibacy celibacy's celibate celibate's celibates cell cell's cellar cellar's cellars cellist cellist's cellists cello cello's cellophane cellophane's cellos cells cellular cellular's cellulars cellulose cellulose's cement cement's cemented cementing cements cemeteries cemetery cemetery's censor censor's censored censoring censors censorship censorship's censure censure's censured censures censuring census census's censused censuses censusing cent cent's centennial centennial's centennials center center's centered centering centerpiece centerpiece's centerpieces centers centimeter centimeter's centimeters centipede centipede's centipedes central central's centralize centralized centralizes centralizing centrally centrals centrifuge cents centuries century century's ceramic ceramic's cereal cereal's cereals cerebral ceremonial ceremonial's ceremonials ceremonies ceremonious ceremony ceremony's certain certainly certainties certainty certainty's certificate certificate's certificated certificates certificating certified certifies certify certifying cervical cessation cessation's cessations chafe chafed chafes chaff chaff's chaffed chaffing chaffs chafing chagrin chagrin's chagrined chagrining chagrins chain chain's chained chaining chains chainsaw chair chair's chaired chairing chairman chairman's chairmen chairperson chairperson's chairpersons chairs chalet chalet's chalets chalice chalice's chalices chalk chalk's chalked chalkier chalkiest chalking chalks chalky challenge challenge's challenged challenger challenger's challengers challenges challenging chamber chamber's chambers chameleon chameleon's chameleons champ champ's champagne champagne's champagnes champed champing champion champion's championed championing champions championship championship's championships champs chance chance's chanced chancellor chancellor's chancellors chances chancing chandelier chandelier's chandeliers change change's changeable changed changeover changes changing channel channel's channeled channeling channels chant chant's chanted chanting chants chaos chaos's chaotic chap chap's chapel chapel's chapels chaperon chaperon's chaperoned chaperoning chaperons chaplain chaplain's chaplains chapped chapping chaps chapter chapter's chapters char char's character character's characteristic characteristic's characteristically characteristics characterization characterize characterized characterizes characterizing characters charcoal charcoal's charcoals charge charge's chargeable charged charger charges charging chariot chariot's chariots charisma charisma's charismatic charismatic's charismatics charitable charitably charities charity charity's charlatan charlatan's charlatans charm charm's charmed charming charms charred charring chars chart chart's charted charter charter's chartered chartering charters charting charts chase chase's chased chases chasing chasm chasm's chasms chassis chassis's chaste chasten chastened chastening chastens chaster chastest chastise chastised chastisement chastisement's chastisements chastises chastising chastity chastity's chat chat's chats chatted chatter chatter's chatterbox chatterbox's chatterboxes chattered chattering chatters chattier chattiest chatting chatty chauffeur chauffeur's chauffeured chauffeuring chauffeurs chauvinist chauvinist's chauvinists cheap cheapen cheapened cheapening cheapens cheaper cheapest cheaply cheapness cheapness's cheat cheat's cheated cheating cheats check check's checked checker checker's checkers checkers's checking checkout checkpoint checks checkup checkup's checkups cheek cheek's cheeked cheeking cheeks cheep cheep's cheeped cheeping cheeps cheer cheer's cheered cheerful cheerfuller cheerfullest cheerfully cheerfulness cheerfulness's cheerier cheeriest cheering cheers cheery cheese cheese's cheesecloth cheesecloth's cheesed cheeses cheesing cheetah cheetah's cheetahs chef chef's chefs chemical chemical's chemically chemicals chemist chemist's chemistry chemistry's chemists cherish cherished cherishes cherishing cherries cherry cherry's cherub cherub's cherubim cherubs chess chess's chest chest's chestnut chestnut's chestnuts chests chew chew's chewed chewier chewiest chewing chews chewy chi chic chic's chicer chicest chick chick's chicken chicken's chickened chickening chickens chicks chide chided chides chiding chief chief's chiefer chiefest chiefly chiefs chieftain chieftain's chieftains child child's childbirth childbirth's childbirths childhood childhood's childhoods childish childlike children chili chili's chilies chill chill's chilled chiller chillest chillier chilliest chilling chills chilly chime chime's chimed chimes chiming chimney chimney's chimneys chimp chimp's chimpanzee chimpanzee's chimpanzees chimps chin chin's china china's chink chink's chinked chinking chinks chinned chinning chins chintz chintz's chip chip's chipmunk chipmunk's chipmunks chipped chipper chipper's chippers chipping chips chiropractor chiropractor's chiropractors chirp chirp's chirped chirping chirps chisel chisel's chiseled chiseling chisels chivalrous chivalry chivalry's chlorine chlorine's chloroform chloroform's chloroformed chloroforming chloroforms chlorophyll chlorophyll's chocolate chocolate's chocolates choice choice's choicer choices choicest choir choir's choirs choke choke's choked chokes choking cholera cholera's cholesterol choose chooses choosier choosiest choosing choosy chop chop's chopped chopper chopper's choppered choppering choppers choppier choppiest chopping choppy chops choral choral's chorals chord chord's chords chore chore's choreographer choreographer's choreographers choreography choreography's chores chortle chortle's chortled chortles chortling chorus chorus's chorused choruses chorusing chose chosen chow chow's chowder chowder's chowders chowed chowing chows christen christened christening christening's christenings christens chrome chrome's chromed chromes chroming chromium chromium's chromosome chromosome's chromosomes chronic chronically chronicle chronicle's chronicled chronicles chronicling chronological chronologically chronologies chronology chronology's chrysanthemum chrysanthemum's chrysanthemums chubbier chubbiest chubby chuck chuck's chucked chucking chuckle chuckle's chuckled chuckles chuckling chucks chug chug's chugged chugging chugs chum chum's chummed chummier chummiest chumming chummy chums chunk chunk's chunkier chunkiest chunks chunky church church's churches churn churn's churned churning churns chute chute's chutes cider cider's ciders cigar cigar's cigarette cigarette's cigarettes cigars cinch cinch's cinched cinches cinching cinder cinder's cindered cindering cinders cinema cinema's cinemas cinnamon cinnamon's cipher cipher's ciphered ciphering ciphers circa circle circle's circled circles circling circuit circuit's circuited circuiting circuitous circuitry circuits circular circular's circulars circulate circulated circulates circulating circulation circulation's circulations circulatory circumcise circumcised circumcises circumcising circumcision circumcision's circumcisions circumference circumference's circumferences circumflex circumstance circumstance's circumstanced circumstances circumstancing circumstantial circumvent circumvented circumventing circumvention circumvention's circumvents circus circus's circuses cistern cistern's cisterns citation citation's citations cite cite's cited cites cities citing citizen citizen's citizens citizenship citizenship's citric citrus citrus's citruses city city's civic civics civics's civil civilian civilian's civilians civilities civility civility's civilization civilization's civilizations civilize civilized civilizes civilizing clack clack's clacked clacking clacks clad claim claim's claimed claiming claims clairvoyance clairvoyance's clairvoyant clairvoyant's clairvoyants clam clam's clamber clamber's clambered clambering clambers clammed clammier clammiest clamming clammy clamor clamor's clamored clamoring clamors clamp clamp's clamped clamping clamps clams clan clan's clandestine clang clang's clanged clanging clangs clank clank's clanked clanking clanks clans clap clap's clapped clapper clapper's clappers clapping claps claptrap claret clarification clarification's clarifications clarified clarifies clarify clarifying clarinet clarinet's clarinets clarity clarity's clash clash's clashed clashes clashing clasp clasp's clasped clasping clasps class class's classed classes classic classic's classical classical's classics classification classification's classifications classified classifies classify classifying classing classmate classmate's classmates classroom classroom's classrooms classy clatter clatter's clattered clattering clatters clause clause's clauses claustrophobia claustrophobia's claw claw's clawed clawing claws clay clay's clean cleaned cleaner cleaner's cleaners cleanest cleaning cleanlier cleanliest cleanliness cleanliness's cleanly cleans cleanse cleansed cleanser cleanser's cleansers cleanses cleansing clear clear's clearance clearance's clearances cleared clearer clearest clearing clearing's clearings clearly clearness clearness's clears cleat cleat's cleats cleavage cleavage's cleavages cleave cleaved cleaver cleaver's cleavers cleaves cleaving clef clef's clefs cleft cleft's clefts clemency clemency's clench clench's clenched clenches clenching clergies clergy clergy's clergyman clergyman's clergymen cleric cleric's clerical clerics clerk clerk's clerked clerking clerks clever cleverer cleverest cleverly cleverness cleverness's cliche cliche's cliches click click's clicked clicking clicks client client's clientele clientele's clienteles clients cliff cliff's cliffs climactic climate climate's climates climax climax's climaxed climaxes climaxing climb climb's climbed climber climber's climbers climbing climbs clime clime's climes clinch clinch's clinched clinches clinching cling cling's clinging clings clinic clinic's clinical clinically clinics clink clink's clinked clinking clinks clip clip's clipboard clipboard's clipboards clipped clipping clipping's clippings clips clique clique's cliques clitoris cloak cloak's cloaked cloaking cloaks clock clock's clocked clocking clocks clockwise clockwork clockwork's clockworks clod clod's clods clog clog's clogged clogging clogs cloister cloister's cloistered cloistering cloisters clone clone's clones close close's closed closely closeness closeness's closer closes closest closet closet's closeted closeting closets closing closure closure's closures clot clot's cloth cloth's clothe clothed clothes clothespin clothespin's clothespins clothing clothing's cloths clots clotted clotting cloud cloud's cloudburst cloudburst's cloudbursts clouded cloudier cloudiest clouding clouds cloudy clout clout's clouted clouting clouts clove clove's cloven clover clover's clovers cloves clown clown's clowned clowning clowns club club's clubbed clubbing clubhouse clubhouse's clubhouses clubs cluck cluck's clucked clucking clucks clue clue's clued clueless clues cluing clump clump's clumped clumping clumps clumsier clumsiest clumsily clumsiness clumsiness's clumsy clung cluster cluster's clustered clustering clusters clutch clutch's clutched clutches clutching clutter clutter's cluttered cluttering clutters coach coach's coached coaches coaching coagulate coagulated coagulates coagulating coagulation coagulation's coal coal's coaled coalesce coalesced coalesces coalescing coaling coalition coalition's coalitions coals coarse coarsely coarsen coarsened coarseness coarseness's coarsening coarsens coarser coarsest coast coast's coastal coasted coaster coaster's coasters coasting coastline coastline's coastlines coasts coat coat's coated coating coats coax coaxed coaxes coaxing cob cob's cobalt cobalt's cobble cobbler cobbler's cobblers cobra cobra's cobras cobs cobweb cobweb's cobwebs cocaine cocaine's cock cock's cocked cockeyed cockier cockiest cocking cockpit cockpit's cockpits cockroach cockroach's cockroaches cocks cocktail cocktail's cocktails cocky cocoa cocoa's cocoas coconut coconut's coconuts cocoon cocoon's cocooned cocooning cocoons cod cod's codded codding code code's coded codes coding cods coefficient coefficient's coefficients coerce coerced coerces coercing coercion coercion's coexist coexisted coexistence coexistence's coexisting coexists coffee coffee's coffees coffer coffer's coffers coffin coffin's coffined coffining coffins cog cog's cogency cogency's cogent cognac cognac's cognacs cognitive cogs coherence coherence's coherent coherently coil coil's coiled coiling coils coin coin's coinage coinage's coinages coincide coincided coincidence coincidence's coincidences coincidental coincidentally coincides coinciding coined coining coins coke coke's coked cokes coking col colander colander's colanders cold cold's colder coldest coldly coldness coldness's colds colic colic's collaborate collaborated collaborates collaborating collaboration collaboration's collaborations collaborative collaborator collaborator's collaborators collage collage's collages collapse collapse's collapsed collapses collapsible collapsing collar collar's collarbone collarbone's collarbones collared collaring collars collate collated collateral collateral's collates collating collation colleague colleague's colleagues collect collect's collected collecting collection collection's collections collective collective's collectively collectives collector collector's collectors collects college college's colleges collegiate collide collided collides colliding collie collie's collies collision collision's collisions colloquial colloquialism colloquialism's colloquialisms collusion collusion's colon colon's colonel colonel's colonels colones colonial colonial's colonials colonies colonization colonization's colonize colonized colonizes colonizing colons colony colony's color color's colored colored's coloreds colorful coloring coloring's colorless colors colossal colt colt's colts column column's columns coma coma's comas comb comb's combat combat's combatant combatant's combatants combated combating combats combed combination combination's combinations combine combine's combined combines combing combining combs combustible combustible's combustibles combustion combustion's come come's comeback comedian comedian's comedians comedies comedy comedy's comelier comeliest comely comes comestible comestible's comestibles comet comet's comets comfort comfort's comfortable comfortably comforted comforting comforts comic comic's comical comics coming coming's comings comma comma's command command's commandant commandant's commandants commanded commandeer commandeered commandeering commandeers commander commander's commanders commanding commandment commandment's commandments commando commando's commandos commands commas commemorate commemorated commemorates commemorating commemoration commemoration's commemorations commence commenced commencement commencement's commencements commences commencing commend commendable commendation commendation's commendations commended commending commends comment comment's commentaries commentary commentary's commentator commentator's commentators commented commenting comments commerce commerce's commercial commercial's commercialism commercialize commercialized commercializes commercializing commercially commercials commiserate commiserated commiserates commiserating commiseration commiseration's commiserations commission commission's commissioned commissioner commissioner's commissioners commissioning commissions commit commitment commitment's commitments commits committed committee committee's committees committing commodities commodity commodity's commodore commodore's commodores common common's commoner commonest commonly commonplace commonplace's commonplaces commons commonwealth commonwealth's commonwealths commotion commotion's commotions communal commune commune's communed communes communicable communicate communicated communicates communicating communication communication's communications communicative communicator communing communion communion's communions communique communique's communiques communism communism's communist communist's communists communities community community's commutative commute commute's commuted commuter commuter's commuters commutes commuting compact compact's compacted compacter compactest compacting compaction compacts companies companion companion's companions companionship companionship's company company's comparable comparative comparative's comparatively comparatives compare compare's compared compares comparing comparison comparison's comparisons compartment compartment's compartments compass compass's compassed compasses compassing compassion compassion's compassionate compatibility compatibility's compatible compatible's compatibles compatriot compatriot's compatriots compel compelled compelling compels compensate compensated compensates compensating compensation compensation's compensations compete competed competence competence's competences competent competently competes competing competition competition's competitions competitive competitor competitor's competitors compilation compilation's compilations compile compiled compiler compiler's compilers compiles compiling complacency complacency's complacent complain complained complaining complains complaint complaint's complaints complement complement's complementary complemented complementing complements complete completed completely completeness completeness's completer completes completest completing completion completion's complex complex's complexes complexion complexion's complexioned complexions complexities complexity complexity's compliance compliance's compliant complicate complicated complicates complicating complication complication's complications complied complies compliment compliment's complimentary complimented complimenting compliments comply complying component component's components compose composed composer composer's composers composes composing composite composite's composites composition composition's compositions compost compost's composted composting composts composure composure's compound compound's compounded compounding compounds comprehend comprehended comprehending comprehends comprehensible comprehension comprehension's comprehensions comprehensive comprehensive's comprehensively comprehensives compress compress's compressed compresses compressing compression compression's comprise comprised comprises comprising compromise compromise's compromised compromises compromising compulsion compulsion's compulsions compulsive compulsories compulsory compulsory's compunction compunction's compunctions computation computation's computational computations compute computed computer computer's computerize computerized computerizes computerizing computers computes computing comrade comrade's comrades comradeship comradeship's con con's concatenate concatenated concatenates concatenating concatenation concatenation's concatenations concave conceal concealed concealing concealment concealment's conceals concede conceded concedes conceding conceit conceit's conceited conceits conceivable conceivably conceive conceived conceives conceiving concentrate concentrate's concentrated concentrates concentrating concentration concentration's concentrations concentric concept concept's conception conception's conceptions concepts conceptual conceptually concern concern's concerned concerning concerns concert concert's concerted concerting concerto concerto's concertos concerts concession concession's concessions conciliate conciliated conciliates conciliating conciliation conciliation's concise concisely conciseness conciseness's conciser concisest conclude concluded concludes concluding conclusion conclusion's conclusions conclusive conclusively concoct concocted concocting concoction concoction's concoctions concocts concord concord's concordance concourse concourse's concourses concrete concrete's concreted concretes concreting concur concurred concurrence concurrence's concurrences concurrency concurrent concurrently concurring concurs concussion concussion's concussions condemn condemnation condemnation's condemnations condemned condemning condemns condensation condensation's condensations condense condensed condenses condensing condescend condescended condescending condescends condiment condiment's condiments condition condition's conditional conditional's conditionally conditionals conditioned conditioning conditions condolence condolence's condolences condom condom's condominium condominium's condominiums condoms condone condoned condones condoning condor condor's condors conducive conduct conduct's conducted conducting conductor conductor's conductors conducts cone cone's cones confection confection's confections confederacies confederacy confederacy's confederate confederate's confederated confederates confederating confederation confederation's confederations confer conference conference's conferences conferred conferrer conferring confers confess confessed confesses confessing confession confession's confessions confetti confetti's confidant confidant's confidants confide confided confidence confidence's confidences confident confidential confidentiality confidentially confidently confides confiding configurable configuration configuration's configurations configure configured configures configuring confine confine's confined confinement confinement's confinements confines confining confirm confirmation confirmation's confirmations confirmed confirming confirms confiscate confiscated confiscates confiscating confiscation confiscation's confiscations conflict conflict's conflicted conflicting conflicts conform conformed conforming conformity conformity's conforms confound confounded confounding confounds confront confrontation confrontation's confrontations confronted confronting confronts confuse confused confuses confusing confusion confusion's congeal congealed congealing congeals congenial congest congested congesting congestion congestion's congests conglomerate conglomerate's conglomerated conglomerates conglomerating congratulate congratulated congratulates congratulating congratulations congregate congregated congregates congregating congregation congregation's congregations congress congress's congresses congressman congressman's congressmen congresswoman congresswoman's congresswomen congruent conical conifer conifer's coniferous conifers conjecture conjecture's conjectured conjectures conjecturing conjugal conjugate conjugated conjugates conjugating conjugation conjugation's conjugations conjunction conjunction's conjunctions conjure conjured conjures conjuring connect connected connecting connection connection's connections connective connectivity connector connector's connectors connects conned conning connoisseur connoisseur's connoisseurs connotation connotation's connotations connote connoted connotes connoting conquer conquered conquering conqueror conqueror's conquerors conquers conquest conquest's conquests cons conscience conscience's consciences conscientious conscious consciously consciousness consciousness's consciousnesses consecrate consecrated consecrates consecrating consecutive consensus consensus's consensuses consent consent's consented consenting consents consequence consequence's consequences consequent consequential consequently conservation conservation's conservatism conservative conservative's conservatives conservatories conservatory conservatory's conserve conserve's conserved conserves conserving consider considerable considerably considerate consideration consideration's considerations considered considering considers consign consigned consigning consignment consignment's consignments consigns consist consisted consistencies consistency consistency's consistent consistently consisting consists consolation consolation's consolations console console's consoled consoles consolidate consolidated consolidates consolidating consolidation consolidation's consolidations consoling consomme consomme's consonant consonant's consonants consort consort's consorted consorting consortium consorts conspicuous conspicuously conspiracies conspiracy conspiracy's conspirator conspirator's conspirators conspire conspired conspires conspiring constancy constancy's constant constant's constantly constants constellation constellation's constellations consternation consternation's constipation constipation's constituencies constituency constituency's constituent constituent's constituents constitute constituted constitutes constituting constitution constitution's constitutional constitutional's constitutionally constitutionals constitutions constrain constrained constraining constrains constraint constraint's constraints constrict constricted constricting constriction constriction's constrictions constricts construct construct's constructed constructing construction construction's constructions constructive constructs construe construed construes construing consul consul's consular consulate consulate's consulates consuls consult consultancy consultant consultant's consultants consultation consultation's consultations consulted consulting consults consumable consumable's consumables consume consumed consumer consumer's consumerism consumers consumes consuming consummate consummated consummates consummating consumption consumption's contact contact's contacted contacting contacts contagion contagion's contagions contagious contain contained container container's containers containing contains contaminate contaminated contaminates contaminating contamination contamination's contemplate contemplated contemplates contemplating contemplation contemplation's contemplative contemplative's contemplatives contemporaries contemporary contemporary's contempt contempt's contemptible contemptuous contend contended contender contender's contenders contending contends content content's contented contenting contention contention's contentions contentious contentment contentment's contents contest contest's contestant contestant's contestants contested contesting contests context context's contexts contextual contiguous continent continent's continental continental's continentals continents contingencies contingency contingency's contingent contingent's contingents continual continually continuation continuation's continuations continue continued continues continuing continuity continuity's continuous continuously continuum contort contorted contorting contortion contortion's contortions contorts contour contour's contoured contouring contours contraband contraband's contraception contraception's contraceptive contraceptive's contraceptives contract contract's contracted contracting contraction contraction's contractions contractor contractor's contractors contracts contractual contradict contradicted contradicting contradiction contradiction's contradictions contradictory contradicts contraption contraption's contraptions contraries contrary contrary's contrast contrast's contrasted contrasting contrasts contravene contravenes contravention contribute contributed contributes contributing contribution contribution's contributions contributor contributor's contributors contributory contrite contrive contrived contrives contriving control control's controllable controlled controller controller's controllers controlling controls controversial controversies controversy controversy's convalesce convalesced convalescence convalescence's convalescences convalescent convalescent's convalescents convalesces convalescing convection convection's convene convened convenes convenience convenience's conveniences convenient conveniently convening convent convent's convention convention's conventional conventionally conventions convents converge converged convergence converges converging conversant conversation conversation's conversational conversations converse converse's conversed conversely converses conversing conversion conversion's conversions convert convert's converted converter converter's converters convertible convertible's convertibles converting converts convex convey conveyance conveyance's conveyances conveyed conveying conveys convict convict's convicted convicting conviction conviction's convictions convicts convince convinced convinces convincing convincingly convoluted convoy convoy's convoyed convoying convoys convulse convulsed convulses convulsing convulsion convulsion's convulsions convulsive coo coo's cooed cooing cook cook's cookbook cookbook's cookbooks cooked cooker cookie cookie's cookies cooking cooks cool cool's cooled cooler cooler's coolers coolest cooling coolly cools coop coop's cooped cooper cooperate cooperated cooperates cooperating cooperation cooperation's cooperative cooperative's cooperatives cooping coops coordinate coordinate's coordinated coordinates coordinating coordination coordination's coordinator coos cop cop's cope cope's coped copes copied copier copier's copiers copies coping copious copiously copped copper copper's copperhead copperhead's copperheads coppers copping cops copulate copulation copy copy's copying copyright copyright's copyrighted copyrighting copyrights coral coral's corals cord cord's corded cordial cordial's cordially cordials cording cordless cordon cordon's cordoned cordoning cordons cords corduroy corduroy's core core's cored cores coring cork cork's corked corking corks corkscrew corkscrew's corkscrewed corkscrewing corkscrews corn corn's cornea cornea's corneas corned corner corner's cornered cornering corners cornet cornet's cornets cornflakes cornier corniest corning cornmeal cornmeal's corns cornstarch cornstarch's corny corollary coronaries coronary coronary's coronation coronation's coronations coroner coroner's coroners corporal corporal's corporals corporate corporation corporation's corporations corps corps's corpse corpse's corpses corpulent corpus corpuscle corpuscle's corpuscles corral corral's corralled corralling corrals correct corrected correcter correctest correcting correction correction's corrections corrective correctly correctness correctness's corrector corrects correlate correlate's correlated correlates correlating correlation correlation's correlations correspond corresponded correspondence correspondence's correspondences correspondent correspondent's correspondents corresponding correspondingly corresponds corridor corridor's corridors corroborate corroborated corroborates corroborating corroboration corrode corroded corrodes corroding corrosion corrosion's corrosive corrosive's corrosives corrupt corrupted corrupter corruptest corruptible corrupting corruption corruption's corruptions corrupts corsage corsage's corsages corset corset's corseted corseting corsets cortex cosmetic cosmetic's cosmetics cosmic cosmology cosmonaut cosmonaut's cosmonauts cosmopolitan cosmopolitan's cosmopolitans cosmos cosmos's cosmoses cost cost's costed costing costings costlier costliest costly costs costume costume's costumed costumes costuming cot cot's cots cottage cottage's cottages cotton cotton's cottoned cottoning cottons cottontail cottontail's cottontails cottonwood cottonwood's cottonwoods couch couch's couched couches couching cougar cougar's cougars cough cough's coughed coughing coughs could couldn't council council's councilor councilor's councilors councils counsel counsel's counseled counseling counselor counselor's counselors counsels count count's countable countdown countdown's countdowns counted countenance countenance's countenanced countenances countenancing counter counter's counteract counteracted counteracting counteracts counterattack counterattack's counterattacked counterattacking counterattacks counterbalance counterbalance's counterbalanced counterbalances counterbalancing counterclockwise countered counterexample counterfeit counterfeit's counterfeited counterfeiting counterfeits countering counterpart counterpart's counterparts counters countersign countersign's countersigned countersigning countersigns countess countess's countesses counties counting countless countries country country's countryman countryman's countrymen countryside countryside's countrysides counts county county's coup coup's couple couple's coupled couples coupling coupon coupon's coupons coups courage courage's courageous courageously courier courier's couriers course course's coursed courser courses coursing court court's courted courteous courteously courtesies courtesy courtesy's courthouse courthouse's courthouses courting courtroom courtroom's courtrooms courts courtship courtship's courtships courtyard courtyard's courtyards cousin cousin's cousins cove cove's covenant covenant's covenanted covenanting covenants cover cover's coverage coverage's covered covering covers covert covert's covertly coverts coves covet coveted coveting covetous covets cow cow's coward coward's cowardice cowardice's cowardly cowards cowboy cowboy's cowboys cowed cower cowered cowering cowers cowgirl cowgirl's cowgirls cowhide cowhide's cowhides cowing cows cox coy coyer coyest coyote coyote's coyotes cozier cozies coziest cozily coziness coziness's cozy cozy's crab crab's crabbed crabbier crabbiest crabbing crabby crabs crack crack's cracked cracker cracker's crackers cracking crackle crackle's crackled crackles crackling crackpot crackpot's crackpots cracks cradle cradle's cradled cradles cradling craft craft's crafted craftier craftiest craftily crafting crafts craftsman craftsman's craftsmen crafty crag crag's craggier craggiest craggy crags cram crammed cramming cramp cramp's cramped cramping cramps crams cranberries cranberry cranberry's crane crane's craned cranes craning cranium cranium's craniums crank crank's cranked crankier crankiest cranking cranks cranky crap crash crash's crashed crashes crashing crass crasser crassest crate crate's crated crater crater's cratered cratering craters crates crating crave craved craves craving craving's cravings crawl crawl's crawled crawling crawls crayfish crayfish's crayfishes crayon crayon's crayoned crayoning crayons craze craze's crazed crazes crazier crazies craziest crazily craziness craziness's crazing crazy crazy's creak creak's creaked creakier creakiest creaking creaks creaky cream cream's creamed creamier creamiest creaming creams creamy crease crease's creased creases creasing create created creates creating creation creation's creations creative creative's creatively creatives creativity creativity's creator creator's creators creature creature's creatures credence credence's credential credential's credentials credibility credibility's credible credit credit's creditable credited crediting creditor creditor's creditors credits credulous creed creed's creeds creek creek's creeks creep creep's creepier creepiest creeping creeps creepy cremate cremated cremates cremating cremation cremation's cremations crepe crepe's crepes crept crescendo crescendo's crescendos crescent crescent's crescents crest crest's crested crestfallen cresting crests cretin cretin's cretinous cretins crevasse crevasse's crevasses crevice crevice's crevices crew crew's crewed crewing crews crib crib's cribbed cribbing cribs cricket cricket's crickets cried cries crime crime's crimes criminal criminal's criminally criminals crimson crimson's crimsoned crimsoning crimsons cringe cringe's cringed cringes cringing crinkle crinkle's crinkled crinkles crinkling cripple cripple's crippled cripples crippling crises crisis crisis's crisp crisp's crisped crisper crispest crisping crisply crisps crispy crisscross crisscross's crisscrossed crisscrosses crisscrossing criteria criterion criterion's critic critic's critical critically criticism criticism's criticisms criticize criticized criticizes criticizing critics critique critique's critiqued critiques critiquing croak croak's croaked croaking croaks crochet crochet's crocheted crocheting crochets crock crock's crockery crockery's crocks crocodile crocodile's crocodiles crocus crocus's crocuses crofts cronies crony crony's crook crook's crooked crookeder crookedest crooking crooks croon croon's crooned crooning croons crop crop's cropped cropping crops croquet croquet's cross cross's crossbow crossbow's crossbows crossed crosser crosses crossest crossing crossing's crossings crossroad crossroad's crossroads crossroads's crosswalk crosswalk's crosswalks crossword crossword's crosswords crotch crotch's crotches crouch crouch's crouched crouches crouching crow crow's crowbar crowbar's crowbars crowd crowd's crowded crowding crowds crowed crowing crown crown's crowned crowning crowns crows crucial crucially crucified crucifies crucifix crucifix's crucifixes crucifixion crucifixion's crucifixions crucify crucifying crude crude's crudely cruder crudest crudity cruel crueler cruelest cruelly cruelties cruelty cruelty's cruise cruise's cruised cruiser cruiser's cruisers cruises cruising crumb crumb's crumbed crumbing crumble crumble's crumbled crumbles crumblier crumbliest crumbling crumbly crumbs crummier crummiest crummy crumple crumple's crumpled crumples crumpling crunch crunch's crunched crunches crunching crunchy crusade crusade's crusaded crusader crusader's crusaders crusades crusading crush crush's crushed crushes crushing crust crust's crustacean crustacean's crustaceans crusted crustier crustiest crusting crusts crusty crutch crutch's crutches crux crux's cruxes cry cry's crybabies crybaby crybaby's crying crypt crypt's cryptic crypts crystal crystal's crystallization crystallization's crystallize crystallized crystallizes crystallizing crystals cs cub cub's cube cube's cubed cubes cubic cubicle cubicle's cubicles cubing cubs cuckoo cuckoo's cuckoos cucumber cucumber's cucumbers cuddle cuddle's cuddled cuddles cuddling cuddly cue cue's cued cues cuff cuff's cuffed cuffing cuffs cuing cuisine cuisine's cuisines culinary cull cull's culled culling culls culminate culminated culminates culminating culmination culmination's culminations culpable culprit culprit's culprits cult cult's cultivate cultivated cultivates cultivating cultivation cultivation's cults cultural culturally culture culture's cultured cultures culturing cum cumbersome cumming cums cumulative cunning cunning's cunninger cunningest cunningly cup cup's cupboard cupboard's cupboards cupful cupful's cupfuls cupped cupping cups cur curable curator curator's curators curb curb's curbed curbing curbs curd curd's curdle curdled curdles curdling curds cure cure's cured cures curfew curfew's curfews curing curio curio's curios curiosities curiosity curiosity's curious curiously curl curl's curled curling curls curly currant currant's currants currencies currency currency's current current's currently currents curricula curriculum curriculum's curried curries curry curry's currying curse curse's cursed curses cursing cursor cursory curt curtail curtailed curtailing curtails curtain curtain's curtained curtaining curtains curter curtest curtsied curtsies curtsy curtsy's curtsying curvature curvature's curvatures curve curve's curved curves curving cushion cushion's cushioned cushioning cushions custard custard's custards custodian custodian's custodians custody custody's custom custom's customary customer customer's customers customization customize customized customizes customizing customs cut cut's cutback cutback's cutbacks cute cuter cutest cuticle cuticle's cuticles cutlery cutlery's cutlet cutlet's cutlets cuts cutter cutter's cutters cutthroat cutthroat's cutthroats cutting cutting's cuttings cyanide cyanide's cybernetics cycle cycle's cycled cycles cyclic cycling cyclist cyclist's cyclists cyclone cyclone's cyclones cylinder cylinder's cylinders cylindrical cymbal cymbal's cymbals cynic cynic's cynical cynicism cynicism's cynics cypress cypress's cypresses cyst cyst's cysts czar czar's czars dab dab's dabbed dabbing dabble dabbled dabbles dabbling dabs dachshund dachshund's dachshunds dad dad's daddies daddy daddy's dads daemon daffodil daffodil's daffodils daft dagger dagger's daggers dailies daily daily's daintier dainties daintiest daintily dainty dainty's dairies dairy dairy's dais dais's daises daisies daisy daisy's dallied dallies dally dallying dam dam's damage damage's damaged damages damaging dame dame's dames dammed damming damn damn's damnation damned damnedest damning damns damp damp's damped dampen dampened dampening dampens damper dampest damping dampness dampness's damps dams damsel damsel's damsels dance dance's danced dancer dancer's dancers dances dancing dandelion dandelion's dandelions dandier dandies dandiest dandruff dandruff's dandy dandy's danger danger's dangerous dangerously dangers dangle dangled dangles dangling dank danker dankest dapper dapperer dapperest dare dare's dared daredevil daredevil's daredevils dares daring daring's dark dark's darken darkened darkening darkens darker darkest darkly darkness darkness's darling darling's darlings darn darn's darned darning darns dart dart's darted darting darts dash dash's dashboard dashboard's dashboards dashed dashes dashing dastardly data database database's databases date date's dated dates dating datum datum's daub daub's daubed daubing daubs daughter daughter's daughters daunt daunted daunting dauntless daunts dawdle dawdled dawdles dawdling dawn dawn's dawned dawning dawns day day's daybreak daybreak's daydream daydream's daydreamed daydreaming daydreams daylight daylight's days daytime daytime's daze daze's dazed dazes dazing dazzle dazzle's dazzled dazzles dazzling deacon deacon's deacons dead dead's deaden deadened deadening deadens deader deadest deadlier deadliest deadline deadline's deadlines deadlock deadlock's deadlocked deadlocking deadlocks deadly deaf deafer deafest deafness deafness's deal deal's dealer dealer's dealers dealing dealing's dealings deals dealt dean dean's deans dear dear's dearer dearest dearly dears dearth dearth's dearths death death's deathbed deathbed's deathbeds deaths deaves debase debased debasement debasement's debasements debases debasing debatable debate debate's debated debates debating debaucheries debauchery debauchery's debilitate debilitated debilitates debilitating debilities debility debility's debit debit's debited debiting debits debonair debrief debriefed debriefing debriefs debris debris's debt debt's debtor debtor's debtors debts debug debugged debugger debugging debugs debunk debunked debunking debunks debut debut's debutante debutante's debutantes debuted debuting debuts decade decade's decadence decadence's decadent decadent's decadents decades decanter decanter's decanters decapitate decapitated decapitates decapitating decay decay's decayed decaying decays decease deceased deceases deceasing deceit deceit's deceitful deceitfully deceits deceive deceived deceives deceiving decencies decency decency's decent decently decentralization decentralization's decentralize decentralized decentralizes decentralizing deception deception's deceptions deceptive decibel decibel's decibels decide decided decidedly decides deciding deciduous decimal decimal's decimals decimate decimated decimates decimating decipher deciphered deciphering deciphers decision decision's decisions decisive decisively deck deck's decked decking decks declaration declaration's declarations declare declared declares declaring declension decline decline's declined declines declining decode decoded decoder decodes decoding decompose decomposed decomposes decomposing decomposition decomposition's decorate decorated decorates decorating decoration decoration's decorations decorative decorator decorator's decorators decorous decorum decorum's decoy decoy's decoyed decoying decoys decrease decrease's decreased decreases decreasing decree decree's decreed decreeing decrees decrepit decried decries decry decrying dedicate dedicated dedicates dedicating dedication dedication's dedications deduce deduced deduces deducing deduct deducted deducting deduction deduction's deductions deductive deducts deed deed's deeded deeding deeds deem deemed deeming deems deep deep's deepen deepened deepening deepens deeper deepest deeply deeps deer deer's deface defaced defaces defacing defamation defamation's defamatory defame defamed defames defaming default default's defaulted defaulting defaults defeat defeat's defeated defeating defeatist defeats defecate defecated defecates defecating defect defect's defected defecting defective defective's defectives defects defend defendant defendant's defendants defended defender defender's defenders defending defends defense defense's defensed defenseless defenses defensible defensing defensive defensive's defer deference deference's deferential deferred deferring defers defiance defiance's defiant defiantly deficiencies deficiency deficiency's deficient deficit deficit's deficits defied defies defile defile's defiled defiles defiling definable define defined defines defining definite definitely definition definition's definitions definitive deflate deflated deflates deflating deflation deflation's deflect deflected deflecting deflection deflection's deflections deflects deform deformed deforming deformities deformity deformity's deforms defraud defrauded defrauding defrauds defrost defrosted defrosting defrosts deft defter deftest deftly defunct defy defying degenerate degenerate's degenerated degenerates degenerating degradation degradation's degrade degraded degrades degrading degree degree's degrees dehydrate dehydrated dehydrates dehydrating deified deifies deify deifying deign deigned deigning deigns deities deity deity's deject dejected dejecting dejection dejection's dejects delay delay's delayed delaying delays delectable delegate delegate's delegated delegates delegating delegation delegation's delegations delete deleted deleterious deletes deleting deletion deletion's deletions deli deli's deliberate deliberated deliberately deliberates deliberating deliberation deliberation's deliberations delicacies delicacy delicacy's delicate delicately delicatessen delicatessen's delicatessens delicious deliciously delight delight's delighted delightful delighting delights delimit delimited delimiter delimiters delimiting delimits delinquencies delinquency delinquency's delinquent delinquent's delinquents delirious deliriously delirium delirium's deliriums delis deliver deliverance deliverance's delivered deliveries delivering delivers delivery delivery's delta delta's deltas delude deluded deludes deluding deluge deluge's deluged deluges deluging delusion delusion's delusions deluxe delve delved delves delving demagogue demagogue's demagogues demand demand's demanded demanding demands demean demeaned demeaning demeanor demeanor's demeans demented dementia demerit demerit's demerits demise demise's demised demises demising democracies democracy democracy's democrat democrat's democratic democratically democrats demolish demolished demolishes demolishing demolition demolition's demolitions demon demon's demons demonstrably demonstrate demonstrated demonstrates demonstrating demonstration demonstration's demonstrations demonstrative demonstrative's demonstratives demonstrator demonstrator's demonstrators demoralize demoralized demoralizes demoralizing demote demoted demotes demoting demotion demotion's demotions demount demure demurely demurer demurest den den's denial denial's denials denied denies denigrate denim denim's denims denomination denomination's denominations denominator denominator's denominators denote denoted denotes denoting denounce denounced denounces denouncing dens dense densely denser densest densities density density's dent dent's dental dented denting dentist dentist's dentistry dentistry's dentists dents denunciation denunciation's denunciations deny denying deodorant deodorant's deodorants deodorize deodorized deodorizes deodorizing depart departed departed's departing department department's departmental departments departs departure departure's departures depend dependable depended dependence dependence's dependencies dependency dependency's dependent dependent's dependents depending depends depict depicted depicting depiction depicts deplete depleted depletes depleting deplorable deplore deplored deplores deploring deport deportation deportation's deportations deported deporting deportment deportment's deports depose deposed deposes deposing deposit deposit's deposited depositing deposits depot depot's depots deprave depraved depraves depraving depravities depravity depravity's deprecate deprecated deprecates deprecating depreciate depreciated depreciates depreciating depreciation depress depressed depresses depressing depressingly depression depression's depressions deprivation deprivation's deprivations deprive deprived deprives depriving depth depth's depths deputies deputy deputy's derail derailed derailing derailment derailment's derailments derails derange deranged deranges deranging derelict derelict's derelicts deride derided derides deriding derision derision's derivation derivation's derivations derivative derivative's derivatives derive derived derives deriving derogatory derrick derrick's derricks descend descendant descendant's descendants descended descending descends descent descent's descents describable describe described describes describing description description's descriptions descriptive descriptor descriptors desecrate desecrated desecrates desecrating desecration desecration's desegregation desegregation's desert desert's deserted deserter deserter's deserters deserting deserts deserve deserved deserves deserving design design's designate designated designates designating designation designation's designations designed designer designer's designers designing designing's designs desirability desirability's desirable desire desire's desired desires desiring desirous desist desisted desisting desists desk desk's desks desktop desolate desolated desolates desolating desolation desolation's despair despair's despaired despairing despairs desperate desperately desperation desperation's despicable despise despised despises despising despite despondent despot despot's despotic despots dessert dessert's desserts destabilize destination destination's destinations destine destined destines destinies destining destiny destiny's destitute destitution destitution's destroy destroyed destroyer destroyer's destroyers destroying destroys destruction destruction's destructive detach detachable detached detaches detaching detachment detachment's detachments detail detail's detailed detailing details detain detained detaining detains detect detectable detected detecting detection detection's detective detective's detectives detector detector's detectors detects detention detention's detentions deter detergent detergent's detergents deteriorate deteriorated deteriorates deteriorating deterioration deterioration's determinable determination determination's determinations determine determined determines determining determinism deterministic deterred deterrent deterrent's deterrents deterring deters detest detested detesting detests dethrone dethroned dethrones dethroning detonate detonated detonates detonating detonation detonation's detonations detonator detonator's detonators detour detour's detoured detouring detours detract detracted detracting detracts detriment detriment's detrimental detriments devalue devastate devastated devastates devastating devastation devastation's develop developed developer developer's developers developing development development's developments develops deviant deviate deviate's deviated deviates deviating deviation deviation's deviations device device's devices devil devil's deviled deviling devils devious devise devise's devised devises devising devoid devolution devolve devolved devolves devolving devote devoted devotee devotee's devotees devotes devoting devotion devotion's devotions devour devoured devouring devours devout devouter devoutest devoutly dew dew's dexterity dexterity's dexterous diabetes diabetes's diabetic diabetic's diabetics diabolical diagnose diagnosed diagnoses diagnosing diagnosis diagnosis's diagnostic diagnostics diagonal diagonal's diagonally diagonals diagram diagram's diagrammed diagramming diagrams dial dial's dialect dialect's dialects dialed dialing dialings dialog dialogue dialogue's dialogues dials diameter diameter's diameters diametrically diamond diamond's diamonds diaper diaper's diapered diapering diapers diaphragm diaphragm's diaphragms diaries diarrhea diarrhea's diary diary's diatribe dice diced dices dicing dictate dictate's dictated dictates dictating dictation dictation's dictations dictator dictator's dictatorial dictators dictatorship dictatorship's dictatorships diction diction's dictionaries dictionary dictionary's did didn't die die's died dies diesel diesel's dieseled dieseling diesels diet diet's dietaries dietary dietary's dieted dieting diets differ differed difference difference's differences different differential differentiate differentiated differentiates differentiating differentiation differently differing differs difficult difficulties difficulty difficulty's diffuse diffused diffuses diffusing diffusion diffusion's dig dig's digest digest's digested digestible digesting digestion digestion's digestions digestive digests digging digit digit's digital digitally digitize digitized digitizes digitizing digits dignified dignifies dignify dignifying dignitaries dignitary dignitary's dignities dignity dignity's digress digressed digresses digressing digression digression's digressions digs dike dike's diked dikes diking dilapidated dilate dilated dilates dilating dilation dilation's dilemma dilemma's dilemmas diligence diligence's diligent diligently dill dill's dills dilute diluted dilutes diluting dilution dilution's dim dime dime's dimension dimension's dimensional dimensions dimer dimes diminish diminished diminishes diminishing diminutive diminutive's diminutives dimly dimmed dimmer dimmest dimming dimple dimple's dimpled dimples dimpling dims din din's dine dined diner diner's diners dines dinghies dinghy dinghy's dingier dingiest dingy dining dinned dinner dinner's dinnered dinnering dinners dinning dinosaur dinosaur's dinosaurs dins diocese diocese's dioceses dioxide dip dip's diphtheria diphtheria's diphthong diphthong's diphthongs diploma diploma's diplomacy diplomacy's diplomas diplomat diplomat's diplomata diplomatic diplomatically diplomats dipped dipping dips dire direct directed directer directest directing direction direction's directions directive directive's directives directly directness directness's director director's directories directors directory directory's directs direr direst dirge dirge's dirges dirt dirt's dirtied dirtier dirties dirtiest dirty dirtying disabilities disability disability's disable disabled disables disabling disadvantage disadvantage's disadvantaged disadvantageous disadvantages disadvantaging disagree disagreeable disagreeably disagreed disagreeing disagreement disagreement's disagreements disagrees disallow disallowed disallowing disallows disambiguate disappear disappearance disappearance's disappearances disappeared disappearing disappears disappoint disappointed disappointing disappointment disappointment's disappointments disappoints disapproval disapproval's disapprove disapproved disapproves disapproving disarm disarmament disarmament's disarmed disarming disarms disarray disarray's disarrayed disarraying disarrays disaster disaster's disasters disastrous disavow disavowed disavowing disavows disband disbanded disbanding disbands disbelief disbelief's disbelieve disbelieved disbelieves disbelieving disburse disbursed disbursement disbursement's disbursements disburses disbursing disc disc's discard discard's discarded discarding discards discern discerned discernible discerning discerns discharge discharge's discharged discharges discharging disciple disciple's disciples disciplinarian disciplinarian's disciplinarians disciplinary discipline discipline's disciplined disciplines disciplining disclaim disclaimed disclaimer disclaiming disclaims disclose disclosed discloses disclosing disclosure disclosure's disclosures disco disco's discolor discoloration discoloration's discolorations discolored discoloring discolors discomfort discomfort's discomforted discomforting discomforts disconcert disconcerted disconcerting disconcerts disconnect disconnected disconnecting disconnects disconsolate disconsolately discontent discontent's discontented discontenting discontents discontinue discontinued discontinues discontinuing discontinuity discord discord's discordant discorded discording discords discos discount discount's discounted discounting discounts discourage discouraged discouragement discouragement's discouragements discourages discouraging discourse discourse's discoursed discourses discoursing discourteous discourtesies discourtesy discourtesy's discover discovered discoveries discovering discovers discovery discovery's discredit discredit's discredited discrediting discredits discreet discreeter discreetest discreetly discrepancies discrepancy discrepancy's discrete discretion discretion's discretionary discriminate discriminated discriminates discriminating discrimination discrimination's discriminatory discs discus discus's discuses discuss discussed discusses discussing discussion discussion's discussions disdain disdain's disdained disdainful disdaining disdains disease disease's diseased diseases disembark disembarkation disembarkation's disembarked disembarking disembarks disenchantment disenchantment's disengage disengaged disengages disengaging disentangle disentangled disentangles disentangling disfavor disfavor's disfavored disfavoring disfavors disfigure disfigured disfigures disfiguring disgrace disgrace's disgraced disgraceful disgraces disgracing disgruntle disgruntled disgruntles disgruntling disguise disguise's disguised disguises disguising disgust disgust's disgusted disgusting disgustingly disgusts dish dish's dishearten disheartened disheartening disheartens dished dishes dishing dishonest dishonestly dishonesty dishonesty's dishonor dishonor's dishonorable dishonored dishonoring dishonors dishwasher dishwasher's dishwashers disillusion disillusion's disillusioned disillusioning disillusionment disillusionment's disillusions disincentive disinfect disinfectant disinfectant's disinfectants disinfected disinfecting disinfects disingenuous disinherit disinherited disinheriting disinherits disintegrate disintegrated disintegrates disintegrating disintegration disintegration's disinterested disjoint disjointed disjointing disjoints disk disk's disks dislike dislike's disliked dislikes disliking dislocate dislocated dislocates dislocating dislocation dislocation's dislocations dislodge dislodged dislodges dislodging disloyal disloyalty disloyalty's dismal dismally dismantle dismantled dismantles dismantling dismay dismay's dismayed dismaying dismays dismember dismembered dismembering dismembers dismiss dismissal dismissal's dismissals dismissed dismisses dismissing dismissive dismount dismount's dismounted dismounting dismounts disobedience disobedience's disobedient disobey disobeyed disobeying disobeys disorder disorder's disordered disordering disorderly disorders disown disowned disowning disowns disparage disparaged disparages disparaging disparate disparities disparity disparity's dispassionate dispassionately dispatch dispatch's dispatched dispatches dispatching dispel dispelled dispelling dispels dispensaries dispensary dispensary's dispensation dispensation's dispensations dispense dispensed dispenser dispenser's dispensers dispenses dispensing dispersal dispersal's disperse dispersed disperses dispersing dispersion displace displaced displacement displacement's displacements displaces displacing display display's displayed displaying displays displease displeased displeases displeasing displeasure displeasure's disposable disposable's disposables disposal disposal's disposals dispose disposed disposes disposing disposition disposition's dispositions dispossess dispossessed dispossesses dispossessing disproportionate disprove disproved disproves disproving dispute dispute's disputed disputes disputing disqualified disqualifies disqualify disqualifying disquiet disquiet's disquieted disquieting disquiets disregard disregard's disregarded disregarding disregards disrepair disrepair's disreputable disrepute disrepute's disrespect disrespect's disrespected disrespectful disrespecting disrespects disrupt disrupted disrupting disruption disruption's disruptions disruptive disrupts dissatisfaction dissatisfaction's dissatisfied dissatisfies dissatisfy dissatisfying dissect dissected dissecting dissection dissection's dissections dissects disseminate disseminated disseminates disseminating dissemination dissemination's dissension dissension's dissensions dissent dissent's dissented dissenter dissenter's dissenters dissenting dissents dissertation dissertation's dissertations disservice disservice's disservices dissident dissident's dissidents dissimilar dissimilarities dissimilarity dissimilarity's dissipate dissipated dissipates dissipating dissipation dissipation's dissociate dissociated dissociates dissociating dissociation dissociation's dissolute dissolution dissolution's dissolve dissolved dissolves dissolving dissonance dissonance's dissonances dissuade dissuaded dissuades dissuading distance distance's distanced distances distancing distant distantly distaste distaste's distasteful distastes distend distended distending distends distill distillation distillation's distillations distilled distiller distiller's distilleries distillers distillery distillery's distilling distills distinct distincter distinctest distinction distinction's distinctions distinctive distinctively distinctly distinguish distinguishable distinguished distinguishes distinguishing distort distorted distorter distorting distortion distortion's distortions distorts distract distracted distracting distraction distraction's distractions distracts distraught distress distress's distressed distresses distressing distressingly distribute distributed distributes distributing distribution distribution's distributions distributor distributor's distributors district district's districts distrust distrust's distrusted distrustful distrusting distrusts disturb disturbance disturbance's disturbances disturbed disturbing disturbs disuse disuse's disused disuses disusing ditch ditch's ditched ditches ditching dither dither's dithered dithering dithers ditties ditto ditto's dittoed dittoing dittos ditty ditty's dive dive's dived diver diver's diverge diverged divergence divergence's divergences divergent diverges diverging divers diverse diversified diversifies diversify diversifying diversion diversion's diversions diversities diversity diversity's divert diverted diverting diverts dives divest divested divesting divests divide divide's divided dividend dividend's dividends divides dividing divine divine's divined diviner divines divinest diving divining divinities divinity divinity's divisible division division's divisions divisive divisor divisor's divisors divorce divorce's divorced divorcee divorcee's divorcees divorces divorcing divulge divulged divulges divulging dizzied dizzier dizzies dizziest dizziness dizziness's dizzy dizzying do do's docile dock dock's docked docking docks doctor doctor's doctorate doctored doctoring doctors doctrine doctrine's doctrines document document's documentaries documentary documentary's documentation documentation's documented documenting documents dodge dodge's dodged dodges dodging dodo doe doe's doer doer's doers does doesn't dog dog's dogged doggedly doggerel dogging doghouse doghouse's doghouses dogma dogma's dogmas dogmatic dogs dogwood dogwood's dogwoods doilies doily doily's doing doldrums doldrums's dole dole's doled doleful dolefully doles doling doll doll's dollar dollar's dollars dolled dollies dolling dolls dolly dolly's dolphin dolphin's dolphins domain domain's domains dome dome's domed domes domestic domestic's domesticate domesticated domesticates domesticating domesticity domesticity's domestics domicile domicile's domiciled domiciles domiciling dominance dominance's dominant dominant's dominants dominate dominated dominates dominating domination domination's doming dominion dominion's dominions domino domino's dominoes don don's don't donate donated donates donating donation donation's donations done donkey donkey's donkeys donor donor's donors dons doodle doodle's doodled doodles doodling doom doom's doomed dooming dooms door door's doorman doorman's doormen doors doorstep doorstep's doorsteps doorway doorway's doorways dope dope's doped dopes dopey dopier dopiest doping dormant dormitories dormitory dormitory's dorsal dos dose dose's dosed doses dosing dot dot's dote doted dotes doting dots dotted dotting double double's doubled doubles doubling doubly doubt doubt's doubted doubtful doubtfully doubting doubtless doubts dough dough's doughnut doughnut's doughnuts dour dourer dourest douse doused douses dousing dove dove's doves dowdier dowdies dowdiest dowdy down down's downcast downed downfall downfall's downfalls downgrade downgrade's downgraded downgrades downgrading downhearted downhill downhill's downhills downier downiest downing downpour downpour's downpours downright downs downstairs downstairs's downstream downtown downtown's downward downwards downy dowries dowry dowry's doze doze's dozed dozen dozen's dozens dozes dozing drab drab's drabber drabbest drabs draconian draft draft's drafted draftier draftiest drafting drafts draftsman draftsman's draftsmen drafty drag drag's dragged dragging dragon dragon's dragonflies dragonfly dragonfly's dragons drags drain drain's drainage drainage's drained draining drains drama drama's dramas dramatic dramatically dramatist dramatist's dramatists dramatization dramatization's dramatizations dramatize dramatized dramatizes dramatizing drank drape drape's draped draperies drapery drapery's drapes draping drastic drastically draw draw's drawback drawback's drawbacks drawbridge drawbridge's drawbridges drawer drawer's drawers drawing drawing's drawings drawl drawl's drawled drawling drawls drawn draws dread dread's dreaded dreadful dreadfully dreading dreads dream dream's dreamed dreamer dreamer's dreamers dreamier dreamiest dreaming dreams dreamy drearier dreariest dreary dredge dredge's dredged dredges dredging dregs dregs's drench drenched drenches drenching dress dress's dressed dresser dresser's dressers dresses dressier dressiest dressing dressing's dressings dressmaker dressmaker's dressmakers dressy drew dribble dribble's dribbled dribbles dribbling dried drier drier's driers dries driest drift drift's drifted drifting drifts driftwood driftwood's drill drill's drilled drilling drills drink drink's drinkable drinker drinker's drinkers drinking drinks drip drip's dripped dripping drips drive drive's drivel driveled driveling drivels driven driver driver's drivers drives driveway driveway's driveways driving drizzle drizzle's drizzled drizzles drizzling droll droller drollest drone drone's droned drones droning drool drool's drooled drooling drools droop droop's drooped drooping droops drop drop's dropout dropout's dropouts dropped dropping droppings drops dross drought drought's droughts drove drove's droves drown drowned drowning drowns drowse drowse's drowsed drowses drowsier drowsiest drowsiness drowsiness's drowsing drowsy drudge drudge's drudged drudgery drudgery's drudges drudging drug drug's drugged drugging druggist druggist's druggists drugs drugstore drugstore's drugstores drum drum's drummed drummer drummer's drummers drumming drums drumstick drumstick's drumsticks drunk drunk's drunkard drunkard's drunkards drunken drunkenly drunkenness drunkenness's drunker drunkest drunks dry dry's dryer dryer's dryers drying dryly dryness dryness's drys dual dualism dub dub's dubbed dubbing dubious dubiously dubs duchess duchess's duchesses duck duck's ducked ducking duckling duckling's ducklings ducks duct duct's ducts dud dud's dude dude's duded dudes duding duds due due's duel duel's dueled dueling duels dues duet duet's duets duff dug dugout dugout's dugouts duke duke's dukes dull dulled duller dullest dulling dullness dullness's dulls dully duly dumb dumbbell dumbbell's dumbbells dumber dumbest dumbfound dumbfounded dumbfounding dumbfounds dummies dummy dummy's dump dump's dumped dumpier dumpiest dumping dumpling dumpling's dumplings dumps dumpster dumpy dunce dunce's dunces dune dune's dunes dung dung's dunged dungeon dungeon's dungeons dunging dungs dunk dunk's dunked dunking dunks dunno duo dupe dupe's duped dupes duping duplex duplex's duplexes duplicate duplicate's duplicated duplicates duplicating duplication duplication's duplicity duplicity's durability durability's durable duration duration's duress duress's during dusk dusk's duskier duskiest dusky dust dust's dustbin dusted dustier dustiest dusting dustmen dustpan dustpan's dustpans dusts dusty duties dutiful dutifully duty duty's duvet dwarf dwarf's dwarfed dwarfing dwarfs dwell dweller dweller's dwellers dwelling dwelling's dwellings dwells dwelt dwindle dwindled dwindles dwindling dye dye's dyed dyeing dyes dying dying's dynamic dynamic's dynamical dynamically dynamics dynamite dynamite's dynamited dynamites dynamiting dynamo dynamo's dynamos dynasties dynasty dynasty's dysentery dysentery's dyslexia each eager eagerer eagerest eagerly eagerness eagerness's eagle eagle's eagles ear ear's earache earache's earaches eardrum eardrum's eardrums earl earl's earlier earliest earls early earmark earmark's earmarked earmarking earmarks earn earned earner earner's earners earnest earnest's earnestly earnestness earnestness's earnests earning earnings earnings's earns earring earring's earrings ears earshot earshot's earth earth's earthed earthier earthiest earthing earthlier earthliest earthly earthquake earthquake's earthquakes earths earthworm earthworm's earthworms earthy ease ease's eased easel easel's easels eases easier easiest easily easing east east's easterlies easterly easterly's eastern eastward easy easygoing eat eaten eater eating eats eave eave's eaves eavesdrop eavesdropped eavesdropping eavesdrops ebb ebb's ebbed ebbing ebbs ebonies ebony ebony's eccentric eccentric's eccentricities eccentricity eccentricity's eccentrics ecclesiastical echo echo's echoed echoes echoing eclair eclair's eclairs eclectic eclipse eclipse's eclipsed eclipses eclipsing ecological ecologically ecologist ecologist's ecologists ecology ecology's economic economical economically economics economics's economies economist economist's economists economize economized economizes economizing economy economy's ecosystem ecosystem's ecosystems ecstasies ecstasy ecstasy's ecstatic ecumenical eczema eczema's eddied eddies eddy eddy's eddying edge edge's edged edger edges edgewise edgier edgiest edging edgy edible edible's edibles edict edict's edicts edifice edifice's edifices edit edit's edited editing edition edition's editions editor editor's editorial editorial's editorials editors editorship edits educate educated educates educating education education's educational educations educator educator's educators eel eel's eels eerie eerier eeriest effect effect's effected effecting effective effectively effectiveness effectiveness's effects effectual effeminate effervescent efficiency efficiency's efficient efficiently effigies effigy effigy's effort effort's effortless effortlessly efforts effusive effusively egalitarian egg egg's egged egging eggplant eggplant's eggplants eggs ego ego's egocentric egoism egoism's egos egotism egotism's egotist egotist's egotists eh eigenvalue eight eight's eighteen eighteen's eighteens eighteenth eighteenth's eighteenths eighth eighth's eighths eighties eightieth eightieth's eightieths eights eighty eighty's either ejaculate ejaculated ejaculates ejaculating ejaculation ejaculation's ejaculations eject ejected ejecting ejection ejection's ejections ejects eke eked ekes eking elaborate elaborated elaborately elaborates elaborating elaboration elaboration's elaborations elapse elapsed elapses elapsing elastic elastic's elasticity elasticity's elastics elation elation's elbow elbow's elbowed elbowing elbows elder elder's elderly elders eldest elect elect's elected electing election election's elections elective elective's electives elector elector's electoral electorate electorate's electorates electors electric electrical electrically electrician electrician's electricians electricity electricity's electrified electrifies electrify electrifying electrocute electrocuted electrocutes electrocuting electrocution electrocution's electrocutions electrode electrode's electrodes electrolysis electrolysis's electromagnetic electron electron's electronic electronically electronics electronics's electrons electrostatic elects elegance elegance's elegant elegantly elegies elegy elegy's element element's elemental elementary elements elephant elephant's elephants elevate elevated elevates elevating elevation elevation's elevations elevator elevator's elevators eleven eleven's elevens eleventh eleventh's elevenths elf elf's elicit elicited eliciting elicits eligibility eligibility's eligible eliminate eliminated eliminates eliminating elimination elimination's eliminations elite elite's elites elitism elitist elk elk's elks ellipse ellipse's ellipses ellipsis ellipsis's elliptic elliptical elm elm's elms elongate elongated elongates elongating elope eloped elopement elopement's elopements elopes eloping eloquence eloquence's eloquent eloquently else elsewhere elucidate elude eluded eludes eluding elusive elves email email's emailed emailing emails emanate emanated emanates emanating emancipate emancipated emancipates emancipating emancipation emancipation's embalm embalmed embalming embalms embankment embankment's embankments embargo embargo's embargoed embargoes embargoing embark embarked embarking embarks embarrass embarrassed embarrasses embarrassing embarrassment embarrassment's embarrassments embassies embassy embassy's embed embedded embedding embeds embellish embellished embellishes embellishing embellishment embellishment's embellishments ember ember's embers embezzle embezzled embezzlement embezzlement's embezzles embezzling embitter embittered embittering embitters emblem emblem's emblems embodied embodies embodiment embodiment's embody embodying emboss embossed embosses embossing embrace embrace's embraced embraces embracing embroider embroidered embroideries embroidering embroiders embroidery embroidery's embryo embryo's embryonic embryos emerald emerald's emeralds emerge emerged emergence emergence's emergencies emergency emergency's emergent emerges emerging emigrant emigrant's emigrants emigrate emigrated emigrates emigrating emigration emigration's emigrations eminence eminence's eminences eminent eminently emir emir's emirs emissaries emissary emissary's emission emission's emissions emit emits emitted emitting emotion emotion's emotional emotionally emotions emotive empathy emperor emperor's emperors emphases emphasis emphasis's emphasize emphasized emphasizes emphasizing emphatic emphatically emphysema emphysema's empire empire's empires empirical employ employ's employed employee employee's employees employer employer's employers employing employment employment's employments employs emporium emporium's emporiums empower empowered empowering empowers empress empress's empresses emptied emptier empties emptiest emptiness emptiness's empty empty's emptying emulate emulated emulates emulating emulation emulation's emulations emulator emulator's emulators emulsion emulsion's emulsions enable enabled enables enabling enact enacted enacting enactment enactment's enactments enacts enamel enamel's enameled enameling enamels encapsulate encapsulated encapsulates encapsulating encase encased encases encasing enchant enchanted enchanting enchantment enchantment's enchantments enchants encircle encircled encircles encircling enclose enclosed encloses enclosing enclosure enclosure's enclosures encode encoded encodes encoding encompass encompassed encompasses encompassing encore encore's encored encores encoring encounter encounter's encountered encountering encounters encourage encouraged encouragement encouragement's encouragements encourages encouraging encroach encroached encroaches encroaching encrypted encryption encumber encumbered encumbering encumbers encumbrance encumbrance's encumbrances encyclopedia encyclopedia's encyclopedias end end's endanger endangered endangering endangers endear endeared endearing endearment endearment's endearments endears endeavor endeavor's endeavored endeavoring endeavors ended endemic endemic's endemics ending ending's endings endive endive's endives endless endlessly endorse endorsed endorsement endorsement's endorsements endorses endorsing endow endowed endowing endowment endowment's endowments endows ends endurance endurance's endure endured endures enduring endways enema enema's enemas enemies enemy enemy's energetic energetically energies energy energy's enforce enforced enforcement enforcement's enforces enforcing engage engaged engagement engagement's engagements engages engaging engender engendered engendering engenders engine engine's engineer engineer's engineered engineering engineering's engineers engines engrave engraved engraver engraver's engravers engraves engraving engraving's engravings engross engrossed engrosses engrossing engulf engulfed engulfing engulfs enhance enhanced enhancement enhancement's enhancements enhances enhancing enigma enigma's enigmas enigmatic enjoy enjoyable enjoyed enjoying enjoyment enjoyment's enjoyments enjoys enlarge enlarged enlargement enlargement's enlargements enlarges enlarging enlighten enlightened enlightening enlightenment enlightens enlist enlisted enlisting enlistment enlistment's enlistments enlists enliven enlivened enlivening enlivens enmities enmity enmity's enormities enormity enormity's enormous enormously enough enough's enrage enraged enrages enraging enrich enriched enriches enriching enrichment enrichment's enroll enrolled enrolling enrollment enrollment's enrollments enrolls ensemble ensemble's ensembles enshrine enshrined enshrines enshrining ensign ensign's ensigns enslave enslaved enslaves enslaving ensue ensued ensues ensuing ensure ensured ensures ensuring entail entailed entailing entails entangle entangled entanglement entanglement's entanglements entangles entangling enter entered entering enterprise enterprise's enterprises enterprising enters entertain entertained entertainer entertainer's entertainers entertaining entertainment entertainment's entertainments entertains enthrall enthralled enthralling enthralls enthusiasm enthusiasm's enthusiasms enthusiast enthusiast's enthusiastic enthusiastically enthusiasts entice enticed enticement enticement's enticements entices enticing entire entirely entirety entirety's entities entitle entitled entitles entitling entity entity's entomologist entomologist's entomologists entomology entomology's entrails entrails's entrance entrance's entranced entrances entrancing entrant entrant's entrants entrap entrapped entrapping entraps entreat entreated entreaties entreating entreats entreaty entreaty's entree entree's entrees entrench entrenched entrenches entrenching entries entropy entrust entrusted entrusting entrusts entry entry's entwine entwined entwines entwining enumerate enumerated enumerates enumerating enumeration enunciate enunciated enunciates enunciating enunciation enunciation's envelop envelope envelope's enveloped envelopes enveloping envelops enviable envied envies envious enviously environment environment's environmental environmentally environments environs environs's envisage envisaged envisages envisaging envoy envoy's envoys envy envy's envying enzyme enzyme's enzymes eon eon's eons epaulet epaulet's epaulets ephemeral epic epic's epics epidemic epidemic's epidemics epidermis epidermis's epidermises epilepsy epilepsy's epileptic epileptic's epileptics epilogue epilogue's epilogues episode episode's episodes epitaph epitaph's epitaphs epithet epithet's epithets epitome epitome's epitomes epoch epoch's epochs epsilon equal equal's equaled equaling equality equality's equalize equalized equalizes equalizing equally equals equanimity equanimity's equate equated equates equating equation equation's equations equator equator's equatorial equators equestrian equestrian's equestrians equilateral equilateral's equilaterals equilibrium equilibrium's equine equine's equines equinox equinox's equinoxes equip equipment equipment's equipped equipping equips equitable equities equity equity's equivalence equivalent equivalent's equivalently equivalents equivocal era era's eradicate eradicated eradicates eradicating eras erase erased eraser eraser's erasers erases erasing erasure erect erected erecting erection erection's erections erects ergo ergonomic erode eroded erodes eroding erosion erosion's erotic err errand errand's errands errant erratic erratically erred erring erroneous erroneously error error's errors errs erstwhile erudite erupt erupted erupting eruption eruption's eruptions erupts escalate escalated escalates escalating escalation escalator escalator's escalators escapade escapade's escapades escape escape's escaped escapes escaping escapism escort escort's escorted escorting escorts esophagi esophagus esophagus's esoteric especial especially espionage espionage's essay essay's essayed essaying essays essence essence's essences essential essential's essentially essentials establish established establishes establishing establishment establishment's establishments estate estate's estates esteem esteem's esteemed esteeming esteems estimate estimate's estimated estimates estimating estimation estimation's estimations estrangement estrangement's estrangements etch etched etches etching etching's etchings eternal eternally eternities eternity eternity's ether ether's ethereal ethic ethic's ethical ethically ethics ethics's ethnic ethnic's ethnics ethos etiquette etiquette's etymological etymologies etymology etymology's eulogies eulogize eulogized eulogizes eulogizing eulogy eulogy's euphemism euphemism's euphemisms eureka euthanasia evacuate evacuated evacuates evacuating evacuation evacuation's evacuations evade evaded evades evading evaluate evaluated evaluates evaluating evaluation evaluation's evaluations evangelical evangelical's evangelicals evangelism evangelist evangelist's evangelistic evangelists evaporate evaporated evaporates evaporating evaporation evaporation's evasion evasion's evasions evasive eve eve's even even's evened evener evenest evening evening's evenings evenly evenness evenness's evens event event's eventful events eventual eventualities eventuality eventuality's eventually ever evergreen evergreen's evergreens everlasting everlasting's everlastings evermore every everybody everybody's everyday everyone everyone's everything everything's everywhere eves evict evicted evicting eviction eviction's evictions evicts evidence evidence's evidenced evidences evidencing evident evidently evil evil's eviler evilest evils evocative evoke evoked evokes evoking evolution evolution's evolutionary evolve evolved evolves evolving ewe ewe's ewes exacerbate exacerbated exacerbates exacerbating exact exacted exacter exactest exacting exactly exacts exaggerate exaggerated exaggerates exaggerating exaggeration exaggeration's exaggerations exalt exaltation exaltation's exalted exalting exalts exam exam's examination examination's examinations examine examined examiner examiner's examiners examines examining example example's exampled examples exampling exams exasperate exasperated exasperates exasperating exasperation exasperation's excavate excavated excavates excavating excavation excavation's excavations exceed exceeded exceeding exceedingly exceeds excel excelled excellence excellence's excellent excellently excelling excels except excepted excepting exception exception's exceptional exceptionally exceptions excepts excerpt excerpt's excerpted excerpting excerpts excess excess's excesses excessive excessively exchange exchange's exchanged exchanges exchanging excise excise's excised excises excising excitable excite excited excitement excitement's excitements excites exciting exclaim exclaimed exclaiming exclaims exclamation exclamation's exclamations exclude excluded excludes excluding exclusion exclusion's exclusive exclusive's exclusively exclusives excommunicate excommunicated excommunicates excommunicating excommunication excommunication's excommunications excrement excrement's excrete excreted excretes excreting excruciating excursion excursion's excursions excusable excuse excuse's excused excuses excusing executable execute executed executes executing execution execution's executioner executioner's executioners executions executive executive's executives executor executor's executors exemplary exemplified exemplifies exemplify exemplifying exempt exempted exempting exemption exemption's exemptions exempts exercise exercise's exercised exercises exercising exert exerted exerting exertion exertion's exertions exerts exhale exhaled exhales exhaling exhaust exhaust's exhausted exhausting exhaustion exhaustion's exhaustive exhausts exhibit exhibit's exhibited exhibiting exhibition exhibition's exhibitions exhibits exhilarate exhilarated exhilarates exhilarating exhilaration exhilaration's exhort exhortation exhortation's exhortations exhorted exhorting exhorts exhume exhumed exhumes exhuming exile exile's exiled exiles exiling exist existed existence existence's existences existent existential existentially existing exists exit exit's exited exiting exits exodus exodus's exoduses exonerate exonerated exonerates exonerating exoneration exoneration's exorbitant exotic exotic's exotics expand expandable expanded expanding expands expanse expanse's expanses expansion expansion's expansions expansive expatriate expatriate's expatriated expatriates expatriating expect expectancy expectant expectation expectation's expectations expected expecting expects expediencies expediency expediency's expedient expedient's expedients expedite expedited expedites expediting expedition expedition's expeditions expel expelled expelling expels expend expendable expendable's expendables expended expending expenditure expenditure's expenditures expends expense expense's expenses expensive experience experience's experienced experiences experiencing experiment experiment's experimental experimentally experimentation experimentation's experimented experimenting experiments expert expert's expertise expertly experts expiration expiration's expire expired expires expiring expiry explain explained explaining explains explanation explanation's explanations explanatory expletive expletive's expletives explicable explicit explicitly explode exploded explodes exploding exploit exploit's exploitation exploitation's exploited exploiting exploits exploration exploration's explorations explore explored explorer explorer's explorers explores exploring explosion explosion's explosions explosive explosive's explosives exponent exponent's exponential exponentially exponents export export's exported exporter exporter's exporters exporting exports expose expose's exposed exposes exposing exposition exposition's expositions exposure exposure's exposures expound expounded expounding expounds express express's expressed expresses expressing expression expression's expressions expressive expressively expressly expressway expressway's expressways expulsion expulsion's expulsions exquisite extant extemporaneous extend extended extending extends extension extension's extensions extensive extensively extent extent's extents exterior exterior's exteriors exterminate exterminated exterminates exterminating extermination extermination's exterminations external external's externally externals extinct extincted extincting extinction extinction's extinctions extincts extinguish extinguished extinguisher extinguisher's extinguishers extinguishes extinguishing extol extolled extolling extols extort extorted extorting extortion extortion's extortionate extorts extra extra's extract extract's extracted extracting extraction extraction's extractions extracts extracurricular extradite extradited extradites extraditing extradition extradition's extraditions extraneous extraordinarily extraordinary extrapolate extrapolated extrapolates extrapolating extrapolation extrapolation's extrapolations extras extraterrestrial extraterrestrial's extraterrestrials extravagance extravagance's extravagances extravagant extravagantly extreme extreme's extremely extremer extremes extremest extremist extremist's extremists extremities extremity extremity's extricate extricated extricates extricating extrovert extrovert's extroverts exuberance exuberance's exuberant exude exuded exudes exuding exult exultant exultation exultation's exulted exulting exults eye eye's eyeball eyeball's eyeballed eyeballing eyeballs eyebrow eyebrow's eyebrows eyed eyeing eyelash eyelash's eyelashes eyelid eyelid's eyelids eyes eyesight eyesight's eyesore eyesore's eyesores eyewitness eyewitness's eyewitnesses fable fable's fables fabric fabric's fabricate fabricated fabricates fabricating fabrication fabrication's fabrications fabrics fabulous facade facade's facades face face's faced faceless faces facet facet's faceted faceting facetious facets facial facial's facials facile facilitate facilitated facilitates facilitating facilities facility facility's facing facsimile facsimile's facsimiled facsimileing facsimiles fact fact's faction faction's factions factor factor's factored factorial factories factoring factorization factors factory factory's facts factual factually faculties faculty faculty's fad fad's fade fade's faded fades fading fads faggot faggot's faggots fagot fagot's fagots fail fail's failed failing failing's failings fails failure failure's failures faint faint's fainted fainter faintest fainting faintly faints fair fair's fairer fairest fairies fairly fairness fairs fairy fairy's faith faith's faithful faithful's faithfully faithfulness faithfulness's faithfuls faithless faiths fake fake's faked fakes faking falcon falcon's falconry falconry's falcons fall fall's fallacies fallacious fallacy fallacy's fallen fallible falling fallout fallout's falls false falsehood falsehood's falsehoods falsely falser falsest falsetto falsetto's falsettos falsification falsification's falsifications falsified falsifies falsify falsifying falsities falsity falsity's falter falter's faltered faltering falters fame fame's famed familiar familiar's familiarity familiarity's familiarize familiarized familiarizes familiarizing familiars families family family's famine famine's famines famous fan fan's fanatic fanatic's fanatical fanatics fancied fancier fancies fanciest fanciful fancy fancy's fancying fanfare fanfare's fanfares fang fang's fangs fanned fanning fans fantasied fantasies fantastic fantastically fantasy fantasy's fantasying far faraway farce farce's farces fare fare's fared fares farewell farewell's farewells faring farm farm's farmed farmer farmer's farmers farming farmland farms farther farthest fascinate fascinated fascinates fascinating fascination fascination's fascinations fascism fascism's fascist fascist's fascists fashion fashion's fashionable fashionably fashioned fashioning fashions fast fast's fasted fasten fastened fastener fastener's fasteners fastening fastening's fastenings fastens faster fastest fastidious fasting fasts fat fat's fatal fatalistic fatalities fatality fatality's fatally fate fate's fated fateful fates father father's fathered fatherhood fatherhood's fathering fatherland fatherland's fatherlands fatherly fathers fathom fathom's fathomed fathoming fathoms fatigue fatigue's fatigued fatigues fatiguing fating fats fatten fattened fattening fattens fatter fattest fattier fatties fattiest fatty fatty's fatuous faucet faucet's faucets fault fault's faulted faultier faultiest faulting faultless faults faulty fauna fauna's faunas favor favor's favorable favorably favored favoring favorite favorite's favorites favoritism favoritism's favors fawn fawn's fawned fawning fawns faze fazed fazes fazing fear fear's feared fearful fearfully fearing fearless fearlessly fears fearsome feasibility feasible feast feast's feasted feasting feasts feat feat's feather feather's feathered featherier featheriest feathering feathers feathery feats feature feature's featured features featuring feces feces's fed fed's federal federal's federalism federalism's federalist federalist's federalists federals federation federation's federations feds fee fee's feeble feebler feeblest feed feed's feedback feedback's feeder feeder's feeders feeding feeds feel feel's feeler feeler's feelers feeling feeling's feelings feels fees feet feign feigned feigning feigns feint feint's feinted feinting feints feline feline's felines fell fell's felled feller fellest felling fellow fellow's fellows fellowship fellowship's fellowships fells felon felon's felonies felons felony felony's felt felt's felted felting felts female female's females feminine feminine's feminines femininity femininity's feminism feminism's feminist feminist's feminists fen fen's fence fence's fenced fences fencing fencing's fend fended fender fender's fenders fending fends ferment ferment's fermentation fermentation's fermented fermenting ferments fern fern's ferns ferocious ferociously ferocity ferocity's ferret ferret's ferreted ferreting ferrets ferried ferries ferry ferry's ferrying fertile fertility fertility's fertilization fertilization's fertilize fertilized fertilizer fertilizer's fertilizers fertilizes fertilizing fervent fervently fervor fervor's fester fester's festered festering festers festival festival's festivals festive festivities festivity festivity's festoon festoon's festooned festooning festoons fetal fetch fetched fetches fetching fete fete's feted fetes fetid feting fetish fetish's fetishes fetter fetter's fettered fettering fetters fetus fetus's fetuses feud feud's feudal feudalism feudalism's feuded feuding feuds fever fever's feverish feverishly fevers few few's fewer fewest fez fez's fezzes fiance fiance's fiancee fiancee's fiancees fiances fiasco fiasco's fiascoes fib fib's fibbed fibber fibber's fibbers fibbing fiber fiber's fiberglass fiberglass's fibers fibs fiche fickle fickler ficklest fiction fiction's fictional fictions fictitious fiddle fiddle's fiddled fiddler fiddler's fiddlers fiddles fiddling fiddly fidelity fidelity's fidget fidget's fidgeted fidgeting fidgets fidgety field field's fielded fielding fields fiend fiend's fiendish fiendishly fiends fierce fiercely fierceness fierceness's fiercer fiercest fierier fieriest fiery fiesta fiesta's fiestas fifteen fifteen's fifteens fifteenth fifteenth's fifteenths fifth fifth's fifths fifties fiftieth fiftieth's fiftieths fifty fifty's fig fig's fight fight's fighter fighter's fighters fighting fights figment figment's figments figs figurative figuratively figure figure's figured figurehead figurehead's figureheads figures figuring filament filament's filaments filch filched filches filching file file's filed files filet filing fill fill's filled filler fillet fillet's filleted filleting fillets fillies filling fills filly filly's film film's filmed filmier filmiest filming films filmy filter filter's filtered filtering filters filth filth's filthier filthiest filthy fin fin's final final's finale finale's finales finalist finalist's finalists finality finality's finalize finalized finalizes finalizing finally finals finance finance's financed finances financial financially financier financier's financiers financing finch finch's finches find find's finding finding's findings finds fine fine's fined finely finer fines finesse finesse's finessed finesses finessing finest finger finger's fingered fingering fingernail fingernail's fingernails fingerprint fingerprint's fingerprinted fingerprinting fingerprints fingers fingertip fingertip's fingertips finickier finickiest finicky fining finish finish's finished finishes finishing finite fins fir fir's fire fire's firearm firearm's firearms firecracker firecracker's firecrackers fired firefighter firefighter's firefighters fireflies firefly firefly's fireman fireman's firemen fireplace fireplace's fireplaces fireproof fireproofed fireproofing fireproofs fires fireside fireside's firesides firewood firewood's firework firework's fireworks firing firm firm's firmed firmer firmest firming firmly firmness firmness's firms firmware firs first first's firsthand firstly firsts fiscal fiscal's fiscals fish fish's fished fisher fisheries fisherman fisherman's fishermen fishery fishery's fishes fishier fishiest fishing fishy fission fission's fissure fissure's fissures fist fist's fists fit fit's fitful fitness fitness's fits fitted fitter fittest fitting fitting's fittings five five's fiver fives fix fix's fixable fixation fixation's fixations fixed fixes fixing fixture fixture's fixtures fizz fizz's fizzed fizzes fizzing fizzle fizzle's fizzled fizzles fizzling fizzy flabbier flabbiest flabby flag flag's flagged flagging flagpole flagpole's flagpoles flagrant flagrantly flags flagship flagship's flagships flagstone flagstone's flagstones flail flail's flailed flailing flails flair flair's flairs flak flake flake's flaked flakes flakier flakiest flaking flaky flamboyance flamboyance's flamboyant flamboyantly flame flame's flamed flames flaming flamingo flamingo's flamingos flammable flammable's flammables flank flank's flanked flanking flanks flannel flannel's flanneled flanneling flannels flap flap's flapjack flapjack's flapjacks flapped flapping flaps flare flare's flared flares flaring flash flash's flashback flashback's flashbacks flashed flasher flashes flashest flashier flashiest flashing flashlight flashlight's flashlights flashy flask flask's flasks flat flat's flatly flatness flatness's flats flatted flatten flattened flattening flattens flatter flattered flatterer flatterer's flatterers flattering flatters flattery flattery's flattest flatting flaunt flaunt's flaunted flaunting flaunts flavor flavor's flavored flavoring flavoring's flavorings flavors flaw flaw's flawed flawing flawless flawlessly flaws flea flea's fleas fleck fleck's flecked flecking flecks fled fledged fledgling fledgling's fledglings flee fleece fleece's fleeced fleeces fleecier fleeciest fleecing fleecy fleeing flees fleet fleet's fleeted fleeter fleetest fleeting fleets flesh flesh's fleshed fleshes fleshier fleshiest fleshing fleshy flew flex flex's flexed flexes flexibility flexibility's flexible flexibly flexing flick flick's flicked flicker flicker's flickered flickering flickers flicking flicks flied flier flier's fliers flies fliest flight flight's flightier flightiest flightless flights flighty flimsier flimsiest flimsiness flimsiness's flimsy flinch flinch's flinched flinches flinching fling fling's flinging flings flint flint's flints flip flip's flippant flipped flipper flipper's flippers flippest flipping flips flirt flirt's flirtation flirtation's flirtations flirtatious flirted flirting flirts flit flit's flits flitted flitting float float's floated floating floats flock flock's flocked flocking flocks flog flogged flogging flogs flood flood's flooded flooder flooding floodlight floodlight's floodlighted floodlighting floodlights floods floor floor's floored flooring flooring's floors flop flop's flopped floppier floppies floppiest flopping floppy floppy's flops flora flora's floral floras florid florist florist's florists floss floss's flossed flosses flossing flotilla flotilla's flotillas flounce flounce's flounced flounces flouncing flounder flounder's floundered floundering flounders flour flour's floured flouring flourish flourish's flourished flourishes flourishing flours flout flout's flouted flouting flouts flow flow's flowed flower flower's flowered flowerier floweriest flowering flowers flowery flowing flown flows flu flu's fluctuate fluctuated fluctuates fluctuating fluctuation fluctuation's fluctuations flue flue's fluency fluency's fluent fluently flues fluff fluff's fluffed fluffier fluffiest fluffing fluffs fluffy fluid fluid's fluids fluke fluke's flukes flung flunk flunk's flunked flunkies flunking flunks flunky flunky's fluorescent flurried flurries flurry flurry's flurrying flush flush's flushed flusher flushes flushest flushing fluster fluster's flustered flustering flusters flute flute's fluted flutes fluting flutist flutist's flutists flutter flutter's fluttered fluttering flutters flux flux's fluxed fluxes fluxing fly fly's flying flyover flyover's flyovers foal foal's foaled foaling foals foam foam's foamed foamier foamiest foaming foams foamy focal focus focus's focused focuses focusing fodder fodder's fodders foe foe's foes fog fog's fogged foggier foggiest fogging foggy foghorn foghorn's foghorns fogies fogs fogy fogy's foible foible's foibles foil foil's foiled foiling foils foist foisted foisting foists fold fold's folded folder folder's folders folding folds foliage foliage's folk folk's folklore folklore's folks folksier folksiest folksy follies follow followed follower follower's followers following following's followings follows folly folly's foment fomented fomenting foments fond fonder fondest fondle fondled fondles fondling fondly fondness fondness's font font's fonts food food's foods foodstuff foodstuff's foodstuffs fool fool's fooled foolhardier foolhardiest foolhardy fooling foolish foolishly foolishness foolishness's foolproof fools foot foot's footage football football's footballs footed foothill foothill's foothills foothold foothold's footholds footing footing's footings footlights footlights's footnote footnote's footnoted footnotes footnoting footpath footpath's footpaths footprint footprint's footprints foots footstep footstep's footsteps footstool footstool's footstools footwear footwear's footwork footwork's for forage forage's foraged forages foraging foray foray's forayed foraying forays forbade forbear forbear's forbearance forbearance's forbearing forbears forbid forbidden forbidding forbiddings forbids forbore forborne force force's forced forceful forcefully forceps forceps's forces forcible forcibly forcing ford ford's forded fording fords fore fore's forearm forearm's forearmed forearming forearms forebode foreboded forebodes foreboding foreboding's forebodings forecast forecast's forecasting forecasts forefather forefather's forefathers forefinger forefinger's forefingers forefront forefront's forefronts forego foregoes foregoing foregone foreground foreground's foregrounded foregrounding foregrounds forehead forehead's foreheads foreign foreigner foreigner's foreigners foreleg foreleg's forelegs foreman foreman's foremen foremost forensic forensic's forensics foreplay forerunner forerunner's forerunners fores foresaw foresee foreseeable foreseeing foreseen foresees foreshadow foreshadowed foreshadowing foreshadows foresight foresight's foreskin foreskin's foreskins forest forest's forestall forestalled forestalling forestalls forested foresting forestry forestry's forests foretaste foretaste's foretasted foretastes foretasting foretell foretelling foretells forethought forethought's foretold forever forever's forewarn forewarned forewarning forewarns forewent foreword foreword's forewords forfeit forfeit's forfeited forfeiting forfeits forgave forge forge's forged forger forger's forgeries forgers forgery forgery's forges forget forgetful forgetfulness forgetfulness's forgets forgetting forging forgive forgiven forgiveness forgiveness's forgives forgiving forgo forgoes forgoing forgone forgot forgotten fork fork's forked forking forks forlorn form form's formal formal's formalities formality formality's formalize formalized formalizes formalizing formally formals format format's formation formation's formations formative formats formatted formatting formed former former's formerly formidable forming formless forms formula formula's formulas formulate formulated formulates formulating formulation formulation's formulations fornication forsake forsaken forsakes forsaking forsook forswear forswearing forswears forswore forsworn fort fort's forte forte's fortes forth forthcoming forthcoming's forthright forthwith forties fortieth fortieth's fortieths fortification fortification's fortifications fortified fortifies fortify fortifying fortitude fortitude's fortnight fortnightly fortress fortress's fortresses forts fortuitous fortunate fortunately fortune fortune's fortunes forty forty's forum forum's forums forward forward's forwarded forwarder forwardest forwarding forwards forwent fossil fossil's fossilize fossilized fossilizes fossilizing fossils foster fostered fostering fosters fought foul foul's fouled fouler foulest fouling fouls found foundation foundation's foundations founded founder founder's foundered foundering founders founding foundling foundling's foundlings foundries foundry foundry's founds fount fount's fountain fountain's fountains founts four four's fours fourteen fourteen's fourteens fourteenth fourteenth's fourteenths fourth fourth's fourths fowl fowl's fowled fowling fowls fox fox's foxed foxes foxier foxiest foxing foxy foyer foyer's foyers fracas fracas's fracases fractal fraction fraction's fractional fractions fracture fracture's fractured fractures fracturing fragile fragility fragility's fragment fragment's fragmentary fragmentary's fragmentation fragmented fragmenting fragments fragrance fragrance's fragrances fragrant frail frailer frailest frailties frailty frailty's frame frame's framed frames framework framework's frameworks framing franc franc's franchise franchise's franchised franchises franchising francs frank frank's franked franker frankest frankfurter frankfurter's frankfurters franking frankly franks frantic frantically fraternal fraternities fraternity fraternity's fraternize fraternized fraternizes fraternizing fraud fraud's frauds fraudulent fraudulently fraught fray fray's frayed fraying frays freak freak's freaked freaking freaks freckle freckle's freckled freckles freckling free freed freedom freedom's freedoms freehand freeing freelance freely freer frees freest freeway freeway's freeways freeze freeze's freezer freezer's freezers freezes freezing freight freight's freighted freighter freighter's freighters freighting freights french frenzied frenzies frenzy frenzy's frequencies frequency frequency's frequent frequented frequenter frequentest frequenting frequently frequents fresh freshen freshened freshening freshens fresher freshest freshly freshman freshman's freshmen freshness freshness's freshwater freshwater's fret fret's fretful fretfully frets fretted fretting friar friar's friars friction friction's fried friend friend's friendlier friendlies friendliest friendliness friendliness's friendly friendly's friends friendship friendship's friendships fries frieze frieze's friezes frigate frigate's frigates fright fright's frighted frighten frightened frightening frighteningly frightens frightful frightfully frighting frights frigid frigidity frigidity's frill frill's frillier frilliest frills frilly fringe fringe's fringed fringes fringing frisk frisked friskier friskiest frisking frisks frisky fritter fritter's frittered frittering fritters frivolities frivolity frivolity's frivolous frizzier frizziest frizzy fro frock frock's frocks frog frog's frogs frolic frolic's frolicked frolicking frolics from frond frond's fronds front front's frontage frontage's frontages frontal fronted frontier frontier's frontiers fronting fronts frost frost's frostbit frostbite frostbite's frostbites frostbiting frostbitten frosted frostier frostiest frosting frosting's frosts frosty froth froth's frothed frothier frothiest frothing froths frothy frown frown's frowned frowning frowns froze frozen frugal frugality frugality's frugally fruit fruit's fruited fruitful fruitier fruitiest fruiting fruition fruition's fruitless fruitlessly fruits fruity frustrate frustrated frustrates frustrating frustration frustration's frustrations fry fry's frying fudge fudge's fudged fudges fudging fuel fuel's fueled fueling fuels fugitive fugitive's fugitives fulcrum fulcrum's fulcrums fulfill fulfilled fulfilling fulfillment fulfillment's fulfills full full's fulled fuller fullest fulling fullness fulls fully fumble fumble's fumbled fumbles fumbling fume fume's fumed fumes fumigate fumigated fumigates fumigating fumigation fumigation's fuming fun fun's function function's functional functionality functionally functioned functioning functions fund fund's fundamental fundamental's fundamentalism fundamentalist fundamentalist's fundamentalists fundamentally fundamentals funded funding funds funeral funeral's funerals fungi fungicide fungicide's fungicides fungus fungus's funnel funnel's funneled funneling funnels funner funnest funnier funnies funniest funnily funny funny's fur fur's furies furious furiously furl furl's furled furling furlong furlong's furlongs furlough furlough's furloughed furloughing furloughs furls furnace furnace's furnaces furnish furnished furnishes furnishing furnishings furnishings's furniture furniture's furor furor's furors furred furrier furriest furring furrow furrow's furrowed furrowing furrows furry furs further furthered furthering furthermore furthers furthest furtive furtively furtiveness furtiveness's fury fury's fuse fuse's fused fuselage fuselage's fuselages fuses fusing fusion fusion's fuss fuss's fussed fusses fussier fussiest fussing fussy futile futility futility's future future's futures futuristic fuzz fuzz's fuzzed fuzzes fuzzier fuzziest fuzzing fuzzy gab gab's gabbed gabbing gable gable's gables gabs gadget gadget's gadgets gag gag's gagged gagging gags gaiety gaiety's gaily gain gain's gained gainful gaining gains gait gait's gaits gal gal's gala gala's galactic galas galaxies galaxy galaxy's gale gale's gales gall gall's gallant gallant's gallantry gallantry's gallants galled galleries gallery gallery's galley galley's galleys galling gallivant gallivanted gallivanting gallivants gallon gallon's gallons gallop gallop's galloped galloping gallops gallows gallows's galls galore gals galvanize galvanized galvanizes galvanizing gambit gambit's gambits gamble gamble's gambled gambler gambler's gamblers gambles gambling game game's gamed gamer games gamest gaming gamma gamut gamut's gamuts gander gander's ganders gang gang's ganged ganging gangling gangplank gangplank's gangplanks gangrene gangrene's gangrened gangrenes gangrening gangs gangster gangster's gangsters gangway gangway's gangways gap gap's gape gape's gaped gapes gaping gaps garage garage's garaged garages garaging garb garb's garbage garbage's garbed garbing garble garbled garbles garbling garbs garden garden's gardened gardener gardener's gardeners gardenia gardenia's gardenias gardening gardens gargle gargle's gargled gargles gargling gargoyle gargoyle's gargoyles garish garland garland's garlanded garlanding garlands garlic garlic's garment garment's garments garnet garnet's garnets garnish garnish's garnished garnishes garnishing garret garret's garrets garrison garrison's garrisoned garrisoning garrisons garrulous garter garter's garters gas gas's gaseous gases gash gash's gashed gashes gashing gasket gasket's gaskets gasoline gasoline's gasp gasp's gasped gasping gasps gassed gassing gastric gate gate's gated gates gateway gateway's gateways gather gather's gathered gathering gathering's gatherings gathers gating gaudier gaudiest gaudy gauge gauge's gauged gauges gauging gaunt gaunter gauntest gauntlet gauntlet's gauntlets gauze gauze's gave gavel gavel's gavels gawk gawked gawkier gawkiest gawking gawks gawky gay gay's gayer gayest gays gaze gaze's gazed gazelle gazelle's gazelles gazes gazette gazette's gazetted gazettes gazetting gazing gear gear's geared gearing gears gee geed geeing gees geese gel gelatin gelatin's geld gelded gelding gelding's geldings gelds gem gem's gems gender gender's genders gene gene's genealogical genealogies genealogy genealogy's genera general general's generality generalization generalization's generalizations generalize generalized generalizes generalizing generally generals generate generated generates generating generation generation's generations generator generator's generators generic generic's generics generosities generosity generosity's generous generously genes geneses genesis genesis's genetic genetically geneticist geneticist's geneticists genetics genetics's genial genially genie genie's genies genii genital genitals genius genius's geniuses genocide genocide's genre genre's genres gent gent's gentile gentile's gentiles gentility gentility's gentle gentled gentleman gentleman's gentlemen gentleness gentleness's gentler gentles gentlest gentling gently gentries gentry gentry's gents genuine genuinely genuineness genuineness's genus genus's geographic geographical geographically geographies geography geography's geological geologies geologist geologist's geologists geology geology's geometric geometries geometry geometry's geranium geranium's geraniums gerbil gerbil's gerbils germ germ's germicide germicide's germicides germinate germinated germinates germinating germination germination's germs gestation gestation's gesticulate gesticulated gesticulates gesticulating gesture gesture's gestured gestures gesturing get get's getaway getaway's getaways gets getting geyser geyser's geysers ghastlier ghastliest ghastly ghetto ghetto's ghettos ghost ghost's ghosted ghosting ghostlier ghostliest ghostly ghosts ghoul ghoul's ghouls giant giant's giants gibber gibbered gibbering gibberish gibberish's gibbers gibe gibe's gibed gibes gibing giddier giddiest giddiness giddiness's giddy gift gift's gifted gifting gifts gig gig's gigantic gigged gigging giggle giggle's giggled giggles giggling gigs gild gild's gilded gilding gilds gill gill's gills gilt gilt's gilts gimme gimmick gimmick's gimmicks gin gin's ginger ginger's gingerbread gingerbread's gingerly gingham gingham's ginned ginning gins giraffe giraffe's giraffes girder girder's girders girdle girdle's girdled girdles girdling girl girl's girlfriend girlfriend's girlfriends girlhood girlhood's girlhoods girlish girls girth girth's girths gist gist's give give's given given's givens gives giving gizzard gizzard's gizzards glacial glacier glacier's glaciers glad glad's gladden gladdened gladdening gladdens gladder gladdest glade glade's glades gladiator gladiator's gladiators gladly glads glamorize glamorized glamorizes glamorizing glamorous glamour glamour's glamoured glamouring glamours glance glance's glanced glances glancing gland gland's glands glandular glare glare's glared glares glaring glass glass's glassed glasses glassier glassiest glassing glassware glassware's glassy glaze glaze's glazed glazes glazing gleam gleam's gleamed gleaming gleams glean gleaned gleaning gleans glee glee's glen glen's glens glib glibber glibbest glibly glide glide's glided glider glider's gliders glides gliding glimmer glimmer's glimmered glimmering glimmers glimpse glimpse's glimpsed glimpses glimpsing glint glint's glinted glinting glints glisten glisten's glistened glistening glistens glitter glitter's glittered glittering glitters gloat gloat's gloated gloating gloats global globally globe globe's globes globular globule globule's globules gloom gloom's gloomier gloomiest gloomy gloried glories glorification glorification's glorified glorifies glorify glorifying glorious gloriously glory glory's glorying gloss gloss's glossaries glossary glossary's glossed glosses glossier glossies glossiest glossing glossy glossy's glove glove's gloved gloves gloving glow glow's glowed glower glower's glowered glowering glowers glowing glows glucose glucose's glue glue's glued glues gluing glum glummer glummest glut glut's gluts glutted glutting glutton glutton's gluttons gluttony gluttony's glycerin glycerin's gnarl gnarled gnarling gnarls gnash gnash's gnashed gnashes gnashing gnat gnat's gnats gnaw gnawed gnawing gnaws gnome gnome's gnomes gnu gnu's gnus go go's goad goad's goaded goading goads goal goal's goalie goalie's goalies goalkeeper goalkeeper's goalkeepers goals goat goat's goatee goatee's goatees goats gob gob's gobbed gobbing gobble gobble's gobbled gobbles gobbling goblet goblet's goblets goblin goblin's goblins gobs god god's godchild godchild's godchildren goddess goddess's goddesses godfather godfather's godfathers godless godlier godliest godlike godly godmother godmother's godmothers godparent godparent's godparents gods godsend godsend's godsends goes goggle goggle's goggles going gold gold's golden goldener goldenest goldfish goldfish's goldfishes golds goldsmith goldsmith's goldsmiths golf golf's golfed golfer golfer's golfers golfing golfs gondola gondola's gondolas gone goner goner's goners gong gong's gonged gonging gongs gonna goo goo's good good's goodbye goodies goodness goodness's goodnight goods goodwill goodwill's goody goody's gooey goof goof's goofed goofier goofiest goofing goofs goofy gooier gooiest goon goon's goons goose goose's goosed gooses goosing gopher gopher's gophers gore gore's gored gores gorge gorge's gorged gorgeous gorges gorging gorier goriest gorilla gorilla's gorillas goring gory gosh gosling gosling's goslings gospel gospel's gospels gossamer gossamer's gossip gossip's gossiped gossiping gossips got gotten gouge gouge's gouged gouges gouging goulash goulash's goulashes gourd gourd's gourds gourmet gourmet's gourmets gout gout's govern governed governess governess's governesses governing government government's governmental governments governor governor's governors governs gown gown's gowned gowning gowns grab grab's grabbed grabber grabbing grabs grace grace's graced graceful gracefully graceless graces gracing gracious graciously graciousness graciousness's gradation gradation's gradations grade grade's graded grader grades gradient gradient's gradients grading gradual gradually graduate graduate's graduated graduates graduating graduation graduation's graduations graffiti graffito graffito's graft graft's grafted grafting grafts grain grain's grains gram gram's grammar grammar's grammars grammatical grammatically gramophone grams grand grand's grandchild grandchild's grandchildren granddaughter granddaughter's granddaughters grander grandest grandeur grandeur's grandfather grandfather's grandfathered grandfathering grandfathers grandiose grandly grandmother grandmother's grandmothers grandparent grandparent's grandparents grands grandson grandson's grandsons grandstand grandstand's grandstanded grandstanding grandstands granite granite's grannies granny granny's granola granola's grant grant's granted granting grants granular granule granule's granules grape grape's grapefruit grapefruit's grapefruits grapes grapevine grapevine's grapevines graph graph's graphed graphic graphic's graphical graphically graphics graphing graphite graphite's graphs grapple grapple's grappled grapples grappling grasp grasp's grasped grasping grasps grass grass's grassed grasses grasshopper grasshopper's grasshoppers grassier grassiest grassing grassy grate grate's grated grateful gratefully grater grater's graters grates gratification gratification's gratifications gratified gratifies gratify gratifying grating grating's gratings gratitude gratitude's gratuities gratuitous gratuitously gratuity gratuity's grave grave's graved gravel gravel's graveled graveling gravels gravely graven graver graves gravest gravestone gravestone's gravestones graveyard graveyard's graveyards gravies graving gravitate gravitated gravitates gravitating gravitation gravitation's gravitational gravity gravity's gravy gravy's gray gray's grayed grayer grayest graying grays graze graze's grazed grazes grazing grease grease's greased greases greasier greasiest greasing greasy great great's greater greatest greatly greatness greatness's greats greed greed's greedier greediest greedily greediness greediness's greedy green green's greenback greenback's greenbacks greened greener greenery greenery's greenest greenhorn greenhorn's greenhorns greenhouse greenhouse's greenhouses greening greens greet greeted greeting greeting's greetings greets gregarious gremlin gremlin's gremlins grenade grenade's grenades grew greyhound greyhound's greyhounds grid grid's griddle griddle's griddles gridiron gridiron's gridirons grids grief grief's griefs grievance grievance's grievances grieve grieved grieves grieving grievous grill grill's grille grille's grilled grilles grilling grills grim grimace grimace's grimaced grimaces grimacing grime grime's grimed grimes grimier grimiest griming grimly grimmer grimmest grimy grin grin's grind grind's grinder grinder's grinders grinding grinds grindstone grindstone's grindstones grinned grinning grins grip grip's gripe gripe's griped gripes griping gripped gripping grips grislier grisliest grisly gristle gristle's grit grit's grits grits's gritted grittier grittiest gritting gritty grizzled grizzlier grizzlies grizzliest grizzly grizzly's groan groan's groaned groaning groans grocer grocer's groceries grocers grocery grocery's groggier groggiest groggy groin groin's groins groom groom's groomed grooming grooms groove groove's grooved grooves groovier grooviest grooving groovy grope grope's groped gropes groping gross gross's grossed grosser grosses grossest grossing grossly grotesque grotesque's grotesques grotto grotto's grottoes grouch grouch's grouched grouches grouchier grouchiest grouching grouchy ground ground's grounded grounding groundless grounds groundwork groundwork's group group's grouped grouper grouper's groupers grouping grouping's groupings groups grouse grouse's groused grouses grousing grove grove's grovel groveled groveling grovels groves grow grower grower's growers growing growl growl's growled growling growls grown grows growth growth's growths grub grub's grubbed grubbier grubbiest grubbing grubby grubs grudge grudge's grudged grudges grudging gruel gruel's grueling gruesome gruesomer gruesomest gruff gruffer gruffest gruffly grumble grumble's grumbled grumbles grumbling grumpier grumpiest grumpy grunt grunt's grunted grunting grunts guarantee guarantee's guaranteed guaranteeing guarantees guarantor guarantor's guarantors guard guard's guarded guardian guardian's guardians guarding guards gubernatorial guerrilla guerrilla's guerrillas guess guess's guessable guessed guesses guessing guesswork guest guest's guested guesting guests guffaw guffaw's guffawed guffawing guffaws guidance guidance's guide guide's guidebook guidebook's guidebooks guided guideline guideline's guidelines guides guiding guild guild's guilds guile guile's guillotine guillotine's guillotined guillotines guillotining guilt guilt's guiltier guiltiest guiltily guiltless guilty guinea guise guise's guises guitar guitar's guitarist guitars gulch gulch's gulches gulf gulf's gulfs gull gull's gulled gullet gullet's gullets gullible gullies gulling gulls gully gully's gulp gulp's gulped gulping gulps gum gum's gumdrop gumdrop's gumdrops gummed gummier gummiest gumming gummy gumption gumption's gums gun gun's gunfire gunfire's gunman gunman's gunmen gunned gunner gunner's gunners gunning gunpowder gunpowder's guns gunshot gunshot's gunshots guppies guppy guppy's gurgle gurgle's gurgled gurgles gurgling guru guru's gurus gush gush's gushed gusher gusher's gushers gushes gushing gust gust's gusted gustier gustiest gusting gusts gusty gut gut's guts gutted gutter gutter's guttered guttering gutters gutting guy guy's guyed guying guys guzzle guzzled guzzles guzzling gym gym's gymnasium gymnasium's gymnasiums gymnast gymnast's gymnastics gymnastics's gymnasts gyms gynecologist gynecologist's gynecologists gynecology gynecology's gyrate gyrated gyrates gyrating gyration gyration's gyrations gyroscope gyroscope's gyroscopes ha habit habit's habitable habitat habitat's habitation habitation's habitations habitats habits habitual habitually hack hack's hacked hacker hacker's hackers hacking hackney hackneyed hackneying hackneys hacks hacksaw hacksaw's hacksaws had haddock haddock's haddocks hag hag's haggard haggle haggle's haggled haggles haggling hags hail hail's hailed hailing hails hailstone hailstone's hailstones hair hair's haircut haircut's haircuts hairdo hairdo's hairdos hairdresser hairdresser's hairdressers haired hairier hairiest hairline hairline's hairlines hairs hairy hale haled haler hales halest half half's halfway halibut halibut's halibuts haling hall hall's hallelujah hallelujah's hallelujahs hallmark hallmark's hallmarked hallmarking hallmarks halls hallucination hallucination's hallucinations hallway hallway's hallways halo halo's haloed haloing halon halos halt halt's halted halter halter's haltered haltering halters halting halts halve halved halves halving ham ham's hamburger hamburger's hamburgers hamlet hamlet's hamlets hammed hammer hammer's hammered hammering hammers hamming hammock hammock's hammocks hamper hamper's hampered hampering hampers hams hamster hamster's hamsters hamstring hamstring's hamstringing hamstrings hamstrung hand hand's handbag handbag's handbags handbook handbook's handbooks handcuff handcuff's handcuffed handcuffing handcuffs handed handedness handful handful's handfuls handicap handicap's handicapped handicapping handicaps handicraft handicraft's handicrafts handier handiest handing handiwork handiwork's handkerchief handkerchief's handkerchiefs handle handle's handlebar handlebar's handlebars handled handler handler's handlers handles handling handmade handout handout's handouts handrail handrail's handrails hands handshake handshake's handshakes handsome handsomer handsomest handwriting handwriting's handy hang hang's hangar hangar's hangars hanged hanger hanger's hangers hanging hanging's hangings hangout hangout's hangouts hangover hangover's hangovers hangs hanker hankered hankering hankers haphazard hapless happen happened happening happening's happenings happens happier happiest happily happiness happiness's happy harangue harangue's harangued harangues haranguing harass harassed harasses harassing harassment harassment's harbor harbor's harbored harboring harbors hard hardback harden hardened hardening hardens harder hardest hardier hardiest hardliner hardliner's hardliners hardly hardship hardship's hardships hardware hardware's hardwood hardwood's hardwoods hardy hare hare's harebrained hared harem harem's harems hares haring hark harked harking harks harlot harlot's harlots harm harm's harmed harmful harmfully harming harmless harmlessly harmonic harmonica harmonica's harmonicas harmonies harmonious harmonize harmonized harmonizes harmonizing harmony harmony's harms harness harness's harnessed harnesses harnessing harp harp's harped harping harpist harpist's harpists harpoon harpoon's harpooned harpooning harpoons harps harpsichord harpsichord's harpsichords harried harries harrow harrowed harrowing harrows harry harrying harsh harsher harshest harshly harshness harshness's hart hart's harts harvest harvest's harvested harvester harvester's harvesters harvesting harvests has hash hash's hashed hashes hashing hassle hassle's hassled hassles hassling haste haste's hasted hasten hastened hastening hastens hastes hastier hastiest hastily hasting hasty hat hat's hatch hatch's hatched hatches hatchet hatchet's hatchets hatching hate hate's hated hateful hatefully hates hating hatred hatred's hatreds hats hatted hatting haughtier haughtiest haughtily haughtiness haughtiness's haughty haul haul's hauled hauling hauls haunt haunt's haunted haunting haunts have have's haven haven's haven't havens haves having havoc havoc's hawk hawk's hawked hawking hawks hay hay's hayed haying hays haystack haystack's haystacks haywire hazard hazard's hazarded hazarding hazardous hazards haze haze's hazed hazel hazel's hazels hazes hazier haziest hazing hazy he he's head head's headache headache's headaches headed header header's headers headfirst headier headiest heading heading's headings headland headland's headlands headlight headlight's headlights headline headline's headlined headlines headlining headlong headmaster headphone headphone's headphones headquarter headquarters headquarters's headrest headrest's headrests headroom headroom's heads headstone headstone's headstones headstrong headway headway's heady heal healed healer healer's healers healing heals health health's healthful healthier healthiest healthy heap heap's heaped heaping heaps hear heard hearing hearing's hearings hears hearsay hearsay's hearse hearse's hearses heart heart's heartache heartache's heartaches heartbeat heartbeat's heartbeats heartbreak heartbreak's heartbreaks heartbroken heartburn heartburn's hearten heartened heartening heartens heartfelt hearth hearth's hearths heartier hearties heartiest heartily heartless hearts hearty hearty's heat heat's heated heatedly heater heater's heaters heath heathen heathen's heathens heather heather's heating heats heave heave's heaved heaven heaven's heavenlier heavenliest heavenly heavens heaves heavier heavies heaviest heavily heaviness heaviness's heaving heavy heavy's heavyweight heavyweight's heavyweights heckle heckle's heckled heckler heckler's hecklers heckles heckling hectic hedge hedge's hedged hedgehog hedgehog's hedgehogs hedges hedging heed heed's heeded heeding heedless heeds heel heel's heeled heeling heels heftier heftiest hefty heifer heifer's heifers height height's heighten heightened heightening heightens heights heinous heir heir's heirloom heirloom's heirlooms heirs held helicopter helicopter's helicoptered helicoptering helicopters heliport heliport's heliports helium helium's hell hell's hellish hello hello's hellos helm helm's helmet helmet's helmets helms help help's helped helper helper's helpers helpful helpfully helping helping's helpings helpless helplessly helps hem hem's hemisphere hemisphere's hemispheres hemlock hemlock's hemlocks hemmed hemming hemoglobin hemoglobin's hemophilia hemophilia's hemorrhage hemorrhage's hemorrhaged hemorrhages hemorrhaging hemp hemp's hems hen hen's hence henceforth henchman henchman's henchmen hens hepatitis hepatitis's her her's herald herald's heralded heralding heralds herb herb's herbivorous herbs herd herd's herded herding herds here here's hereabouts hereafter hereafter's hereafters hereby hereditary heredity heredity's herein heresies heresy heresy's heretic heretic's heretical heretics herewith heritage heritage's heritages hermaphrodite hermit hermit's hermits hernia hernia's hernias hero hero's heroes heroic heroin heroin's heroine heroine's heroins heroism heroism's heron heron's herons herpes herring herring's herrings hers herself hes hesitancy hesitancy's hesitant hesitate hesitated hesitates hesitating hesitation hesitation's hesitations heterogeneous heterosexual heterosexual's heterosexuality heterosexuals heuristic hew hewed hewing hews hexadecimal hexagon hexagon's hexagonal hexagons hey heyday heyday's heydays hi hiatus hiatus's hiatuses hibernate hibernated hibernates hibernating hibernation hibernation's hiccup hiccup's hiccuped hiccuping hiccups hick hick's hickories hickory hickory's hicks hid hidden hide hide's hideaway hideaway's hideaways hided hideous hideously hides hiding hierarchical hierarchies hierarchy hierarchy's hieroglyphic hieroglyphic's hieroglyphics high high's highbrow highbrow's highbrows higher highest highland highland's highlands highlight highlight's highlighted highlighting highlights highly highs highway highway's highways hijack hijack's hijacked hijacking hijacks hike hike's hiked hiker hiker's hikers hikes hiking hilarious hilarity hilarity's hill hill's hillbillies hillbilly hillbilly's hillier hilliest hills hillside hillside's hillsides hilly hilt hilt's hilts him him's hims himself hind hind's hinder hindered hindering hinders hindrance hindrance's hindrances hinds hindsight hindsight's hinge hinge's hinged hinges hinging hint hint's hinted hinterland hinterland's hinterlands hinting hints hip hip's hipped hipper hippest hippie hippie's hippies hipping hippopotamus hippopotamus's hippopotamuses hippy hips hire hire's hired hires hiring his hiss hiss's hissed hisses hissing histogram historian historian's historians historic historical historically histories history history's hit hit's hitch hitch's hitched hitches hitchhike hitchhike's hitchhiked hitchhiker hitchhiker's hitchhikers hitchhikes hitchhiking hitching hither hitherto hits hitting hive hive's hived hives hiving ho hoard hoard's hoarded hoarder hoarder's hoarders hoarding hoards hoarse hoarseness hoarseness's hoarser hoarsest hoax hoax's hoaxed hoaxes hoaxing hobbies hobbit hobble hobble's hobbled hobbles hobbling hobby hobby's hobbyhorse hobbyhorse's hobbyhorses hobgoblin hobgoblin's hobgoblins hobnob hobnobbed hobnobbing hobnobs hobo hobo's hobos hock hock's hocked hockey hockey's hocking hocks hodgepodge hodgepodge's hodgepodges hoe hoe's hoed hoeing hoes hog hog's hogged hogging hogs hoist hoist's hoisted hoisting hoists hold hold's holder holder's holders holding holds holdup holdup's holdups hole hole's holed holes holiday holiday's holidayed holidaying holidays holier holiest holiness holiness's holing holler holler's hollered hollering hollers hollies hollow hollow's hollowed hollower hollowest hollowing hollows holly holly's holocaust holocaust's holocausts holster holster's holstered holstering holsters holy homage homage's homages home home's homed homeland homeland's homelands homeless homeless's homelier homeliest homely homemade homes homesick homesickness homesickness's homespun homespun's homestead homestead's homesteaded homesteading homesteads homeward homework homework's homey homey's homeys homicidal homicide homicide's homicides homier homiest homing homogeneous homogenize homogenized homogenizes homogenizing homonym homonym's homonyms homophobic homosexual homosexual's homosexuality homosexuals hone hone's honed hones honest honester honestest honestly honesty honesty's honey honey's honeycomb honeycomb's honeycombed honeycombing honeycombs honeyed honeying honeymoon honeymoon's honeymooned honeymooning honeymoons honeys honeysuckle honeysuckle's honeysuckles honing honk honk's honked honking honks honor honor's honorable honorary honored honoring honors hood hood's hooded hooding hoodlum hoodlum's hoodlums hoods hoodwink hoodwinked hoodwinking hoodwinks hoof hoof's hoofed hoofing hoofs hook hook's hooked hooking hooks hoop hoop's hooped hooping hoops hooray hoot hoot's hooted hooter hooting hoots hooves hop hop's hope hope's hoped hopeful hopeful's hopefully hopefuls hopeless hopelessly hopes hoping hopped hopper hopping hops hopscotch hopscotch's hopscotched hopscotches hopscotching horde horde's horded hordes hording horizon horizon's horizons horizontal horizontal's horizontally horizontals hormone hormone's hormones horn horn's horned hornet hornet's hornets hornier horniest horns horny horoscope horoscope's horoscopes horrendous horrendously horrible horribly horrid horrific horrified horrifies horrify horrifying horror horror's horrors horse horse's horseback horseback's horsed horseman horseplay horseplay's horsepower horsepower's horseradish horseradish's horseradishes horses horseshoe horseshoe's horseshoed horseshoeing horseshoes horsing horticultural horticulture horticulture's hose hose's hosed hoses hosiery hosiery's hosing hospitable hospital hospital's hospitality hospitality's hospitalization hospitalization's hospitalizations hospitalize hospitalized hospitalizes hospitalizing hospitals host host's hostage hostage's hostages hosted hostel hostel's hosteled hosteling hostels hostess hostess's hostessed hostesses hostessing hostile hostile's hostiles hostility hostility's hosting hosts hot hotbed hotbed's hotbeds hotel hotel's hotels hothead hothead's hotheaded hotheads hotly hotter hottest hound hound's hounded hounding hounds hour hour's hourglass hourglass's hourglasses hourly hours house house's houseboat houseboat's houseboats housed household household's households housekeeper housekeeper's housekeepers houses housewarming housewarming's housewarmings housewife housewife's housewives housework housework's housing housing's housings hove hovel hovel's hovels hover hovered hovering hovers how how's however howl howl's howled howling howls hows hub hub's hubbub hubbub's hubbubs hubs huddle huddle's huddled huddles huddling hue hue's hued hues huff huff's huffed huffier huffiest huffing huffs huffy hug hug's huge hugely huger hugest hugged hugging hugs huh hulk hulk's hulking hulks hull hull's hullabaloo hullabaloo's hullabaloos hulled hulling hulls hum hum's human human's humane humanely humaner humanest humanism humanist humanitarian humanitarian's humanitarians humanities humanity humanity's humanize humanized humanizes humanizing humanly humans humble humbled humbler humbles humblest humbling humbly humbug humdrum humdrum's humid humidified humidifies humidify humidifying humidity humidity's humiliate humiliated humiliates humiliating humiliation humiliation's humiliations humility humility's hummed humming hummingbird hummingbird's hummingbirds humor humor's humored humoring humorist humorist's humorists humorous humorously humors hump hump's humped humping humps hums hunch hunch's hunchback hunchback's hunchbacks hunched hunches hunching hundred hundred's hundreds hundredth hundredth's hundredths hung hunger hunger's hungered hungering hungers hungrier hungriest hungrily hungry hunk hunk's hunks hunt hunt's hunted hunter hunter's hunters hunting hunts hurdle hurdle's hurdled hurdles hurdling hurl hurl's hurled hurling hurls hurrah hurrah's hurrahed hurrahing hurrahs hurricane hurricane's hurricanes hurried hurriedly hurries hurry hurry's hurrying hurt hurt's hurtful hurting hurtle hurtled hurtles hurtling hurts husband husband's husbanded husbanding husbands hush hush's hushed hushes hushing husk husk's husked huskier huskies huskiest huskily huskiness huskiness's husking husks husky husky's hustle hustle's hustled hustler hustler's hustlers hustles hustling hut hut's hutch hutch's hutches huts hyacinth hyacinth's hyacinths hybrid hybrid's hybrids hydrant hydrant's hydrants hydraulic hydraulics hydraulics's hydroelectric hydrogen hydrogen's hydroplane hydroplane's hydroplaned hydroplanes hydroplaning hyena hyena's hyenas hygiene hygiene's hygienic hymn hymn's hymnal hymnal's hymnals hymned hymning hymns hyperbole hyperbole's hypertension hypertension's hyphen hyphen's hyphenate hyphenate's hyphenated hyphenates hyphenating hyphenation hyphened hyphening hyphens hypnosis hypnosis's hypnotic hypnotic's hypnotics hypnotism hypnotism's hypnotist hypnotist's hypnotists hypnotize hypnotized hypnotizes hypnotizing hypochondria hypochondria's hypochondriac hypochondriac's hypochondriacs hypocrisies hypocrisy hypocrisy's hypocrite hypocrite's hypocrites hypocritical hypotenuse hypotenuse's hypotenuses hypotheses hypothesis hypothesis's hypothesize hypothesized hypothesizes hypothesizing hypothetical hysteria hysteria's hysteric hysteric's hysterical hysterically hysterics hysterics's ice ice's iceberg iceberg's icebergs icebreaker icebreaker's icebreakers iced ices icicle icicle's icicles icier iciest icing icing's icings icon icon's icons icy id idea idea's ideal ideal's idealist idealist's idealistic idealists idealize idealized idealizes idealizing ideally ideals ideas identical identically identifiable identification identification's identified identifier identifiers identifies identify identifying identities identity identity's ideological ideologically ideologies ideology ideology's idiocies idiocy idiocy's idiom idiom's idiomatic idioms idiosyncrasies idiosyncrasy idiosyncrasy's idiosyncratic idiot idiot's idiotic idiots idle idle's idled idler idles idlest idling idly idol idol's idolize idolized idolizes idolizing idols idyllic if if's ifs igloo igloo's igloos ignite ignited ignites igniting ignition ignition's ignitions ignorance ignorance's ignorant ignore ignored ignores ignoring iguana iguana's iguanas ilk ill ill's illegal illegal's illegally illegals illegible illegibly illegitimate illicit illiteracy illiteracy's illiterate illiterate's illiterates illness illness's illnesses illogical ills illuminate illuminated illuminates illuminating illumination illumination's illuminations illusion illusion's illusions illusory illustrate illustrated illustrates illustrating illustration illustration's illustrations illustrative illustrator illustrator's illustrators illustrious image image's imaged imagery imagery's images imaginable imaginary imagination imagination's imaginations imaginative imagine imagined imagines imaging imagining imbalance imbalance's imbalances imbecile imbecile's imbeciles imitate imitated imitates imitating imitation imitation's imitations imitative imitator imitator's imitators immaculate immaculately immaterial immature immaturity immaturity's immeasurable immeasurably immediate immediately immense immensely immensities immensity immensity's immerse immersed immerses immersing immersion immersion's immersions immigrant immigrant's immigrants immigrate immigrated immigrates immigrating immigration immigration's imminent imminently immobile immobilize immobilized immobilizes immobilizing immoral immoralities immorality immorality's immortal immortal's immortality immortality's immortals immovable immune immunity immunity's immunization immunization's immunizations immunize immunized immunizes immunizing imp imp's impact impact's impacted impacting impacts impair impaired impairing impairment impairment's impairments impairs impale impaled impales impaling impart imparted impartial impartiality impartiality's impartially imparting imparts impassable impasse impasse's impasses impassioned impassive impatience impatience's impatiences impatient impatiently impeach impeached impeaches impeaching impeccable impedance impede impeded impedes impediment impediment's impediments impeding impel impelled impelling impels impend impended impending impends impenetrable imperative imperative's imperatives imperceptible imperceptibly imperfect imperfect's imperfection imperfection's imperfections imperfectly imperfects imperial imperial's imperialism imperialism's imperialist imperials imperil imperiled imperiling imperils impersonal impersonally impersonate impersonated impersonates impersonating impersonation impersonation's impersonations impertinence impertinence's impertinent impervious impetuous impetuously impetus impetus's impetuses impinge impinged impinges impinging impish implacable implant implant's implanted implanting implants implausible implement implement's implementable implementation implementation's implementations implemented implementer implementing implements implicate implicated implicates implicating implication implication's implications implicit implicitly implied implies implore implored implores imploring imply implying impolite import import's importance importance's important importantly importation importation's importations imported importing imports impose imposed imposes imposing imposition imposition's impositions impossibilities impossibility impossibility's impossible impossibles impossibly impostor impostor's impostors impotence impotence's impotent impound impounded impounding impounds impoverish impoverished impoverishes impoverishing impractical imprecise impregnable impregnate impregnated impregnates impregnating impress impress's impressed impresses impressing impression impression's impressionable impressions impressive impressively imprint imprint's imprinted imprinting imprints imprison imprisoned imprisoning imprisonment imprisonment's imprisonments imprisons improbabilities improbability improbability's improbable improbably impromptu impromptu's impromptus improper improperly improprieties impropriety impropriety's improve improved improvement improvement's improvements improves improving improvisation improvisation's improvisations improvise improvised improvises improvising imps impudence impudence's impudent impulse impulse's impulsed impulses impulsing impulsive impulsively impunity impunity's impure impurer impurest impurities impurity impurity's in in's inabilities inability inability's inaccessible inaccuracies inaccuracy inaccuracy's inaccurate inaction inaction's inactive inactivity inadequacies inadequacy inadequacy's inadequate inadequately inadmissible inadvertent inadvertently inadvisable inalienable inane inaner inanest inanimate inapplicable inappropriate inarticulate inasmuch inaudible inaugural inaugural's inaugurals inaugurate inaugurated inaugurates inaugurating inauguration inauguration's inaugurations inauspicious inborn inbred inbreed inbreeding inbreeds inbuilt incalculable incandescence incandescence's incandescent incantation incantation's incantations incapable incapacitate incapacitated incapacitates incapacitating incapacity incapacity's incarcerate incarcerated incarcerates incarcerating incarceration incarceration's incarcerations incarnate incarnated incarnates incarnating incarnation incarnation's incarnations incendiaries incendiary incendiary's incense incense's incensed incenses incensing incentive incentive's incentives inception inception's inceptions incessant incessantly incest incest's incestuous inch inch's inched inches inching incidence incidence's incidences incident incident's incidental incidental's incidentally incidentals incidents incinerate incinerated incinerates incinerating incinerator incinerator's incinerators incision incision's incisions incisive incisor incisor's incisors incite incited incitement incitement's incitements incites inciting inclination inclination's inclinations incline incline's inclined inclines inclining include included includes including inclusion inclusion's inclusions inclusive incognito incognito's incognitos incoherence incoherence's incoherent incoherently income income's incomes incoming incomparable incompatibilities incompatibility incompatibility's incompatible incompatible's incompatibles incompatibly incompetence incompetence's incompetent incompetent's incompetents incomplete incomprehensible inconceivable inconclusive incongruities incongruity incongruity's incongruous inconsequential inconsiderable inconsiderate inconsistencies inconsistency inconsistency's inconsistent inconsolable inconspicuous inconvenience inconvenience's inconvenienced inconveniences inconveniencing inconvenient inconveniently incorporate incorporated incorporates incorporating incorporation incorporation's incorrect incorrectly incorrigible increase increase's increased increases increasing increasingly incredible incredibly incredulity incredulity's incredulous increment increment's incremental incremented increments incriminate incriminated incriminates incriminating incubate incubated incubates incubating incubation incubation's incubator incubator's incubators incumbent incumbent's incumbents incur incurable incurable's incurables incurred incurring incurs indebted indecencies indecency indecency's indecent indecision indecision's indecisive indeed indefensible indefinable indefinite indefinitely indelible indelibly indelicate indent indent's indentation indentation's indentations indented indenting indents independence independence's independent independent's independently independents indescribable indestructible indeterminate index index's indexed indexes indexing indicate indicated indicates indicating indication indication's indications indicative indicative's indicatives indicator indicator's indicators indices indict indicted indicting indictment indictment's indictments indicts indifference indifference's indifferent indigenous indigestible indigestion indigestion's indignant indignantly indignation indignation's indignities indignity indignity's indigo indigo's indirect indirection indirectly indiscreet indiscretion indiscretion's indiscretions indiscriminate indiscriminately indispensable indispensable's indispensables indisposed indisputable indistinct indistinguishable individual individual's individualism individualism's individualist individualist's individualists individuality individuality's individually individuals indivisible indoctrinate indoctrinated indoctrinates indoctrinating indoctrination indoctrination's indolence indolence's indolent indomitable indoor indoors induce induced inducement inducement's inducements induces inducing induct inducted inducting induction induction's inductions inducts indulge indulged indulgence indulgence's indulgences indulgent indulges indulging industrial industrialist industrialist's industrialists industrialization industrialization's industrialize industrialized industrializes industrializing industries industrious industry industry's inedible ineffective ineffectual inefficiencies inefficiency inefficiency's inefficient inefficiently inelegant ineligible ineligible's ineligibles inept ineptitude inequalities inequality inequality's inert inertia inertia's inertial inescapable inevitable inevitable's inevitably inexact inexcusable inexhaustible inexorable inexorably inexpensive inexperience inexperience's inexperienced inexplicable inexplicably inextricably infallible infamies infamous infamy infamy's infancy infancy's infant infant's infantile infantries infantry infantry's infants infatuation infatuation's infatuations infect infected infecting infection infection's infections infectious infects infelicities infelicity infelicity's infer inference inference's inferences inferior inferior's inferiority inferiority's inferiors inferno inferno's infernos inferred inferring infers infertile infest infestation infestation's infestations infested infesting infests infidel infidel's infidelities infidelity infidelity's infidels infield infield's infields infiltrate infiltrated infiltrates infiltrating infiltration infiltration's infinite infinite's infinitely infinitesimal infinitesimal's infinitesimals infinities infinitive infinitive's infinitives infinity infinity's infirm infirmaries infirmary infirmary's infirmities infirmity infirmity's infix inflame inflamed inflames inflaming inflammable inflammation inflammation's inflammations inflammatory inflatable inflate inflated inflates inflating inflation inflation's inflationary inflection inflection's inflections inflexible inflict inflicted inflicting inflicts influence influence's influenced influences influencing influential influenza influenza's influx influx's influxes info inform informal informality informality's informally informant informant's informants information information's informational informative informed informer informer's informers informing informs infraction infraction's infractions infrared infrared's infrastructure infrequent infrequently infringe infringed infringement infringement's infringements infringes infringing infuriate infuriated infuriates infuriating infuse infused infuses infusing infusion infusion's infusions ingenious ingeniously ingenuity ingenuity's ingest ingested ingesting ingests ingrain ingrained ingraining ingrains ingratiate ingratiated ingratiates ingratiating ingratitude ingratitude's ingredient ingredient's ingredients inhabit inhabitant inhabitant's inhabitants inhabited inhabiting inhabits inhale inhaled inhaler inhaler's inhalers inhales inhaling inherent inherently inherit inheritance inheritance's inheritances inherited inheriting inherits inhibit inhibited inhibiting inhibition inhibition's inhibitions inhibits inhospitable inhuman inhumane inhumanities inhumanity inhumanity's initial initial's initialed initialing initialization initialize initialized initializes initializing initially initials initiate initiate's initiated initiates initiating initiation initiation's initiations initiative initiative's initiatives initiator initiator's initiators inject injected injecting injection injection's injections injects injunction injunction's injunctions injure injured injures injuries injuring injurious injury injury's injustice injustice's injustices ink ink's inked inkier inkiest inking inkling inkling's inklings inks inky inlaid inland inland's inlay inlay's inlaying inlays inlet inlet's inlets inmate inmate's inmates inn inn's innards innards's innate inner innermost inning inning's innings innkeeper innkeeper's innkeepers innocence innocence's innocent innocent's innocently innocents innocuous innovation innovation's innovations innovative inns innuendo innuendo's innuendos innumerable inoculate inoculated inoculates inoculating inoculation inoculation's inoculations inoffensive inoperative inopportune inordinate input input's inputs inputted inputting inquest inquest's inquests inquire inquired inquires inquiries inquiring inquiry inquiry's inquisition inquisition's inquisitions inquisitive ins insane insanely insaner insanest insanity insanity's insatiable inscribe inscribed inscribes inscribing inscription inscription's inscriptions inscrutable insect insect's insecticide insecticide's insecticides insects insecure insecurities insecurity insecurity's insensitive insensitivity insensitivity's inseparable inseparable's inseparables insert insert's inserted inserting insertion insertion's insertions inserts inside inside's insider insider's insiders insides insidious insight insight's insights insignia insignia's insignificance insignificance's insignificant insincere insincerely insincerity insincerity's insinuate insinuated insinuates insinuating insinuation insinuation's insinuations insipid insist insisted insistence insistence's insistent insisting insists insofar insolence insolence's insolent insoluble insolvency insolvency's insolvent insolvent's insolvents insomnia insomnia's inspect inspected inspecting inspection inspection's inspections inspector inspector's inspectors inspects inspiration inspiration's inspirations inspire inspired inspires inspiring instability instability's install installation installation's installations installed installing installment installment's installments installs instance instance's instanced instances instancing instant instant's instantaneous instantaneously instantly instants instead instep instep's insteps instigate instigated instigates instigating instigation instigation's instill instilled instilling instills instinct instinct's instinctive instincts institute institute's instituted institutes instituting institution institution's institutional institutionalize institutionalized institutionalizes institutionalizing institutions instruct instructed instructing instruction instruction's instructions instructive instructor instructor's instructors instructs instrument instrument's instrumental instrumental's instrumentals instrumented instrumenting instruments insubordinate insubordination insubordination's insubstantial insufferable insufficient insufficiently insular insulate insulated insulates insulating insulation insulation's insulator insulator's insulators insulin insulin's insult insult's insulted insulting insults insurance insurance's insurances insure insured insurer insurer's insurers insures insurgent insurgent's insurgents insuring insurmountable insurrection insurrection's insurrections intact intake intake's intakes intangible intangible's intangibles integer integer's integers integral integral's integrals integrate integrated integrates integrating integration integration's integrity integrity's intellect intellect's intellects intellectual intellectual's intellectually intellectuals intelligence intelligence's intelligent intelligently intelligible intelligibly intend intended intending intends intense intensely intenser intensest intensified intensifies intensify intensifying intensities intensity intensity's intensive intensive's intensives intent intent's intention intention's intentional intentionally intentions intents inter interact interacted interacting interaction interaction's interactions interactive interactively interacts intercede interceded intercedes interceding intercept intercept's intercepted intercepting interception interception's interceptions intercepts interchange interchange's interchangeable interchanged interchanges interchanging intercom intercom's intercoms interconnect intercontinental intercourse intercourse's interdependence interdependence's interdependent interest interest's interested interesting interestingly interests interface interface's interfaced interfaces interfacing interfere interfered interference interference's interferes interfering interim interim's interior interior's interiors interject interjected interjecting interjection interjection's interjections interjects interlock interlock's interlocked interlocking interlocks interloper interloper's interlopers interlude interlude's interluded interludes interluding intermarriage intermarriage's intermarriages intermarried intermarries intermarry intermarrying intermediaries intermediary intermediary's intermediate intermediate's intermediates interment interment's interments interminable interminably intermingle intermingled intermingles intermingling intermission intermission's intermissions intermittent intermittently intern intern's internal internally internals international international's internationally internationals interned internet interning interns interplanetary interplay interplay's interpolation interpose interposed interposes interposing interpret interpretation interpretation's interpretations interpreted interpreter interpreter's interpreters interpreting interprets interracial interred interring interrogate interrogated interrogates interrogating interrogation interrogation's interrogations interrogator interrogator's interrogators interrupt interrupt's interrupted interrupting interruption interruption's interruptions interrupts inters intersect intersected intersecting intersection intersection's intersections intersects intersperse interspersed intersperses interspersing interstate interstate's interstates interstellar intertwine intertwined intertwines intertwining interval interval's intervals intervene intervened intervenes intervening intervention intervention's interventions interview interview's interviewed interviewer interviewer's interviewers interviewing interviews interweave interweaves interweaving interwove interwoven intestinal intestine intestine's intestines intimacies intimacy intimacy's intimate intimate's intimated intimately intimates intimating intimation intimation's intimations intimidate intimidated intimidates intimidating intimidation intimidation's into intolerable intolerably intolerance intolerance's intolerant intonation intonation's intonations intoxicate intoxicated intoxicates intoxicating intoxication intoxication's intractable intramural intransitive intransitive's intransitives intravenous intravenous's intravenouses intrepid intricacies intricacy intricacy's intricate intrigue intrigue's intrigued intrigues intriguing intrinsic intrinsically introduce introduced introduces introducing introduction introduction's introductions introductory introspective introvert introvert's introverts intrude intruded intruder intruder's intruders intrudes intruding intrusion intrusion's intrusions intrusive intuition intuition's intuitions intuitive intuitively inundate inundated inundates inundating inundation inundation's inundations invade invaded invader invader's invaders invades invading invalid invalid's invalidate invalidated invalidates invalidating invalided invaliding invalids invaluable invariable invariable's invariables invariably invariant invasion invasion's invasions invective invent invented inventing invention invention's inventions inventive inventor inventor's inventoried inventories inventors inventory inventory's inventorying invents inverse inverse's inversely inverses inversion inversion's inversions invert invert's invertebrate invertebrate's invertebrates inverted inverting inverts invest invested investigate investigated investigates investigating investigation investigation's investigations investigator investigator's investigators investing investment investment's investments investor investor's investors invests inveterate invigorate invigorated invigorates invigorating invincible invisibility invisibility's invisible invisibly invitation invitation's invitations invite invite's invited invites inviting invocation invocation's invocations invoice invoice's invoiced invoices invoicing invoke invoked invokes invoking involuntarily involuntary involve involved involvement involvement's involvements involves involving invulnerable inward inwardly inwards iodine iodine's ion ion's ions iota iota's iotas irascible irate ire ire's iridescence iridescence's iridescent iris iris's irises irk irked irking irks iron iron's ironed ironic ironically ironies ironing irons irony irony's irradiate irradiated irradiates irradiating irrational irrational's irrationally irrationals irreconcilable irrefutable irregular irregular's irregularities irregularity irregularity's irregulars irrelevance irrelevance's irrelevances irrelevant irreparable irreplaceable irrepressible irreproachable irresistible irrespective irresponsibility irresponsibility's irresponsible irretrievable irretrievably irreverence irreverence's irreverent irreversible irrevocable irrevocably irrigate irrigated irrigates irrigating irrigation irrigation's irritability irritability's irritable irritably irritant irritant's irritants irritate irritated irritates irritating irritation irritation's irritations is island island's islander islander's islanders islands isle isle's isles isn't isolate isolate's isolated isolates isolating isolation isolation's issue issue's issued issues issuing isthmus isthmus's isthmuses it it's italic italic's italicize italicized italicizes italicizing italics itch itch's itched itches itchier itchiest itching itchy item item's itemize itemized itemizes itemizing items iterate iteration iteration's iterations iterative itinerant itinerant's itinerants itineraries itinerary itinerary's its itself ivies ivories ivory ivory's ivy ivy's jab jab's jabbed jabber jabber's jabbered jabbering jabbers jabbing jabs jack jack's jackal jackal's jackals jackass jackass's jackasses jackdaw jacked jacket jacket's jackets jacking jackknife jackknife's jackknifed jackknifes jackknifing jackknives jackpot jackpot's jackpots jacks jade jade's jaded jades jading jagged jaggeder jaggedest jaguar jaguar's jaguars jail jail's jailed jailer jailer's jailers jailing jails jalopies jalopy jalopy's jam jam's jamb jamb's jamboree jamboree's jamborees jambs jammed jamming jams jangle jangle's jangled jangles jangling janitor janitor's janitors jar jar's jargon jargon's jarred jarring jars jaundice jaundice's jaundiced jaundices jaundicing jaunt jaunt's jaunted jauntier jauntiest jauntily jaunting jaunts jaunty javelin javelin's javelins jaw jaw's jawbone jawbone's jawboned jawbones jawboning jawed jawing jaws jay jay's jays jaywalk jaywalked jaywalker jaywalker's jaywalkers jaywalking jaywalks jazz jazz's jazzed jazzes jazzing jealous jealousies jealously jealousy jealousy's jeans jeans's jeer jeer's jeered jeering jeers jell jelled jellied jellies jelling jells jelly jelly's jellyfish jellyfish's jellyfishes jellying jeopardize jeopardized jeopardizes jeopardizing jeopardy jeopardy's jerk jerk's jerked jerkier jerkiest jerking jerks jerky jerky's jersey jersey's jerseys jest jest's jested jester jester's jesters jesting jests jet jet's jets jetted jetties jetting jettison jettison's jettisoned jettisoning jettisons jetty jetty's jewel jewel's jeweled jeweler jeweler's jewelers jeweling jewelries jewelry jewelry's jewels jibe jibe's jibed jibes jibing jiffies jiffy jiffy's jig jig's jigged jigging jiggle jiggle's jiggled jiggles jiggling jigs jigsaw jigsaw's jigsawed jigsawing jigsaws jilt jilt's jilted jilting jilts jingle jingle's jingled jingles jingling jinx jinx's jinxed jinxes jinxing jitterier jitteriest jitters jitters's jittery job job's jobbed jobbing jobs jockey jockey's jockeyed jockeying jockeys jocular jog jog's jogged jogger jogger's joggers jogging jogs join join's joined joining joins joint joint's jointed jointing jointly joints joke joke's joked joker joker's jokers jokes joking jollied jollier jollies jolliest jolly jolly's jollying jolt jolt's jolted jolting jolts jostle jostle's jostled jostles jostling jot jot's jots jotted jotting journal journal's journalism journalism's journalist journalist's journalists journals journey journey's journeyed journeying journeys jovial jovially joy joy's joyed joyful joyfuller joyfullest joyfully joying joyous joyously joys joystick jubilant jubilation jubilation's jubilee jubilee's jubilees judge judge's judged judges judging judgment judgment's judgments judicial judicially judiciaries judiciary judiciary's judicious judiciously judo judo's jug jug's jugged juggernaut jugging juggle juggle's juggled juggler juggler's jugglers juggles juggling jugs jugular jugular's jugulars juice juice's juiced juices juicier juiciest juicing juicy jumble jumble's jumbled jumbles jumbling jumbo jumbo's jumbos jump jump's jumped jumper jumper's jumpers jumpier jumpiest jumping jumps jumpy junction junction's junctions juncture juncture's junctures jungle jungle's jungles junior junior's juniors juniper juniper's junipers junk junk's junked junket junket's junketed junketing junkets junkie junkie's junkies junking junks junta junta's juntas juries jurisdiction jurisdiction's juror juror's jurors jury jury's just juster justest justice justice's justices justifiable justifiably justification justification's justifications justified justifies justify justifying justly jut jut's jute jute's juts jutted jutting juvenile juvenile's juveniles juxtapose juxtaposed juxtaposes juxtaposing juxtaposition juxtaposition's juxtapositions kaleidoscope kaleidoscope's kaleidoscopes kangaroo kangaroo's kangaroos karat karat's karate karate's karats kayak kayak's kayaked kayaking kayaks keel keel's keeled keeling keels keen keen's keened keener keenest keening keenly keens keep keep's keeper keeper's keepers keeping keeping's keeps keepsake keepsake's keepsakes keg keg's kegs kelp kelp's ken kennel kennel's kenneled kenneling kennels kept kerchief kerchief's kerchiefs kernel kernel's kernels kerosene kerosene's ketchup ketchup's kettle kettle's kettles key key's keyboard keyboard's keyboarded keyboarding keyboards keyed keyhole keyhole's keyholes keying keynote keynote's keynoted keynotes keynoting keys keystone keystone's keystones keystroke keystroke's keystrokes keyword keyword's keywords khaki khaki's khakis kick kick's kickback kickback's kickbacks kicked kicking kickoff kickoff's kickoffs kicks kid kid's kidded kidding kidnap kidnapped kidnapper kidnapper's kidnappers kidnapping kidnaps kidney kidney's kidneys kids kill kill's killed killer killer's killers killing killing's killings kills kiln kiln's kilned kilning kilns kilo kilo's kilobyte kilobyte's kilobytes kilogram kilogram's kilograms kilometer kilometer's kilometers kilos kilowatt kilowatt's kilowatts kilt kilt's kilts kimono kimono's kimonos kin kin's kind kind's kinda kinder kindergarten kindergarten's kindergartens kindest kindle kindled kindles kindlier kindliest kindling kindling's kindly kindness kindness's kindnesses kindred kindred's kinds kinfolk kinfolk's king king's kingdom kingdom's kingdoms kingfisher kingfisher's kingfishers kings kink kink's kinked kinkier kinkiest kinking kinks kinky kinship kinship's kiosk kiosk's kiosks kipper kiss kiss's kissed kisses kissing kit kit's kitchen kitchen's kitchenette kitchenette's kitchenettes kitchens kite kite's kited kites kiting kits kitten kitten's kittens kitties kitty kitty's kiwi kiwi's kiwis knack knack's knacker knacks knapsack knapsack's knapsacks knead kneaded kneading kneads knee knee's kneecap kneecap's kneecapped kneecapping kneecaps kneed kneeing kneel kneeling kneels knees knelt knew knickers knickers's knife knife's knifed knifes knifing knight knight's knighted knighthood knighthood's knighthoods knighting knights knit knit's knits knitted knitting knives knob knob's knobs knock knock's knocked knocker knocker's knockers knocking knockout knockout's knockouts knocks knoll knoll's knolls knot knot's knots knotted knottier knottiest knotting knotty know knowing knowingly knowings knowledge knowledge's knowledgeable known knows knuckle knuckle's knuckled knuckles knuckling koala koala's koalas kosher koshered koshering koshers kowtow kowtow's kowtowed kowtowing kowtows kudos kudos's lab lab's label label's labeled labeling labels labor labor's laboratories laboratory laboratory's labored laborer laborer's laborers laboring laborious laboriously labors labs labyrinth labyrinth's labyrinths lace lace's laced lacerate lacerated lacerates lacerating laceration laceration's lacerations laces lacier laciest lacing lack lack's lacked lacking lackluster lacks lacquer lacquer's lacquered lacquering lacquers lacrosse lacrosse's lacy lad lad's ladder ladder's laddered laddering ladders lade laded laden lades ladies lading ladle ladle's ladled ladles ladling lads lady lady's ladybug ladybug's ladybugs ladylike lag lag's lager laggard laggard's laggards lagged lagging lagoon lagoon's lagoons lags laid lain lair lair's lairs lake lake's lakes lamb lamb's lambda lambed lambing lambs lame lame's lamed lament lament's lamentable lamentation lamentation's lamentations lamented lamenting laments lamer lames lamest laming lamp lamp's lampoon lampoon's lampooned lampooning lampoons lamps lance lance's lanced lances lancing land land's landed lander landing landing's landings landladies landlady landlady's landlocked landlord landlord's landlords landmark landmark's landmarks landowner landowner's landowners lands landscape landscape's landscaped landscapes landscaping landslid landslide landslide's landslides landsliding lane lane's lanes language language's languages languid languish languished languishes languishing languor languor's languorous languors lankier lankiest lanky lantern lantern's lanterns lap lap's lapel lapel's lapels lapped lapping laps lapse lapse's lapsed lapses lapsing larcenies larceny larceny's lard lard's larded larding lards large large's largely larger larges largest lark lark's larked larking larks larva larva's larvae larynges laryngitis laryngitis's larynx larynx's lascivious laser laser's lasers lash lash's lashed lashes lashing lass lass's lasses last last's lasted lasting lastly lasts latch latch's latched latches latching late lately latent later lateral lateral's lateraled lateraling laterals latest latex latex's lath lathe lathe's lathed lather lather's lathered lathering lathers lathes lathing laths latitude latitude's latitudes latrine latrine's latrines latter latter's lattice lattice's lattices laud laud's laudable lauded lauding lauds laugh laugh's laughable laughed laughing laughingstock laughingstock's laughingstocks laughs laughter laughter's launch launch's launched launcher launcher's launchers launches launching launder laundered laundering launders laundries laundry laundry's laureate laureate's laureates laurel laurel's laurels lava lava's lavatories lavatory lavatory's lavender lavender's lavenders lavish lavished lavisher lavishes lavishest lavishing law law's lawful lawless lawmaker lawmaker's lawmakers lawn lawn's lawns laws lawsuit lawsuit's lawsuits lawyer lawyer's lawyers lax laxative laxative's laxatives laxer laxest laxity laxity's lay lay's layer layer's layered layering layers laying layman layman's laymen layout layout's layouts lays lazied lazier lazies laziest laziness lazy lazying leach lead lead's leaded leaden leader leader's leaders leadership leadership's leading leads leaf leaf's leafed leafier leafiest leafing leaflet leaflet's leafleted leafleting leaflets leafs leafy league league's leagued leagues leaguing leak leak's leakage leakage's leakages leaked leaking leaks leaky lean lean's leaned leaner leanest leaning leans leap leap's leaped leapfrog leapfrog's leapfrogged leapfrogging leapfrogs leaping leaps learn learned learning learning's learns lease lease's leased leases leash leash's leashed leashes leashing leasing least least's leather leather's leathery leave leave's leaved leaves leaving lectern lectern's lecterns lecture lecture's lectured lecturer lecturer's lecturers lectures lecturing led ledge ledge's ledger ledger's ledgers ledges lee leech leech's leeched leeches leeching leek leek's leeks leer leer's leered leerier leeriest leering leers leery leeway leeway's left left's lefter leftest leftmost lefts leg leg's legacies legacy legacy's legal legal's legalistic legality legality's legalize legalized legalizes legalizing legally legals legend legend's legendary legends legged legging legging's leggings legibility legible legibly legion legion's legions legislate legislated legislates legislating legislation legislation's legislative legislator legislator's legislators legislature legislature's legislatures legitimacy legitimacy's legitimate legitimated legitimately legitimates legitimating legs legume legume's legumes leisure leisure's leisurely lemme lemon lemon's lemonade lemonade's lemons lend lending lends length length's lengthen lengthened lengthening lengthens lengthier lengthiest lengths lengthwise lengthy leniency leniency's lenient lens lens's lenses lent lentil lentil's lentils leopard leopard's leopards leotard leotard's leotards leper leper's lepers leprosy leprosy's lesbian lesbian's lesbians lesion lesion's lesions less less's lessen lessened lessening lessens lesser lesson lesson's lessons lest let let's letdown letdown's letdowns lethal lethargic lethargy lethargy's lets letter letter's lettered letterhead letterhead's letterheads lettering letters letting lettuce lettuce's lettuces letup letup's letups leukemia leukemia's levee levee's levees level level's leveled leveling levels lever lever's leverage leverage's leveraged leverages leveraging levered levering levers levied levies levity levity's levy levy's levying lewd lewder lewdest lexical lexicon lexicon's lexicons liabilities liability liability's liable liaison liaison's liaisons liar liar's liars libel libel's libeled libeling libelous libels liberal liberal's liberalism liberalism's liberalization liberalize liberalized liberalizes liberalizing liberally liberals liberate liberated liberates liberating liberation liberation's libertarian liberties liberty liberty's librarian librarian's librarians libraries library library's libretto lice license license's licensed licenses licensing lichen lichen's lichens lick lick's licked licking licks licorice licorice's licorices lid lid's lids lie lie's lied lies lieu lieu's lieutenant lieutenant's lieutenants life life's lifeboat lifeboat's lifeboats lifeforms lifeguard lifeguard's lifeguards lifeless lifelike lifeline lifeline's lifelines lifelong lifespan lifestyle lifestyle's lifestyles lifetime lifetime's lifetimes lift lift's lifted lifting lifts ligament ligament's ligaments ligature ligature's ligatures light light's lighted lighten lightened lightening lightens lighter lighter's lighters lightest lighthouse lighthouse's lighthouses lighting lightly lightness lightness's lightning lightning's lightninged lightnings lights lightweight lightweight's lightweights likable like like's liked likelier likeliest likelihood likelihood's likelihoods likely liken likened likeness likeness's likenesses likening likens liker likes likest likewise liking liking's lilac lilac's lilacs lilies lilt lilt's lilted lilting lilts lily lily's limb limb's limber limbered limbering limbers limbo limbs lime lime's limed limelight limelight's limerick limerick's limericks limes limestone limestone's liming limit limit's limitation limitation's limitations limited limiting limitless limits limousine limousine's limousines limp limp's limped limper limpest limping limps linchpin linchpin's linchpins line line's lineage lineage's lineages linear linearly lined linefeed linen linen's liner liner's liners lines linger lingered lingerie lingerie's lingering lingers lingo lingo's lingoes linguist linguist's linguistic linguistics linguistics's linguists liniment liniment's liniments lining lining's linings link link's linkage linked linker linking links linoleum linoleum's lint lint's lion lion's lioness lioness's lionesses lions lip lip's lips lipstick lipstick's lipsticked lipsticking lipsticks liquefied liquefies liquefy liquefying liqueur liqueur's liqueurs liquid liquid's liquidate liquidated liquidates liquidating liquidation liquidation's liquidations liquids liquor liquor's liquored liquoring liquors lisp lisp's lisped lisping lisps list list's listed listen listen's listened listener listener's listeners listening listens listing listing's listings listless lists lit litanies litany litany's liter liter's literacy literacy's literal literal's literally literals literary literate literate's literates literature literature's liters lithe lither lithest lithium litigation litigation's litter litter's litterbug litterbug's litterbugs littered littering litters little little's littler littlest liturgical liturgies liturgy liturgy's livable live lived livelier liveliest livelihood livelihood's livelihoods liveliness liveliness's lively liven livened livening livens liver liver's livers lives livest livestock livestock's livid living living's livings lizard lizard's lizards llama llama's llamas load load's loadable loaded loader loading loads loaf loaf's loafed loafer loafer's loafers loafing loafs loam loam's loan loan's loaned loaning loans loath loathe loathed loathes loathing loathing's loathings loathsome loaves lob lob's lobbed lobbied lobbies lobbing lobby lobby's lobbying lobbyist lobbyist's lobbyists lobe lobe's lobes lobotomy lobs lobster lobster's lobsters local local's locale locale's locales localities locality locality's localize localized localizes localizing locally locals locate located locates locating location location's locations lock lock's locked locker locker's lockers locket locket's lockets locking locks locksmith locksmith's locksmiths locomotion locomotion's locomotive locomotive's locomotives locust locust's locusts lodge lodge's lodged lodger lodger's lodgers lodges lodging lodging's lodgings loft loft's lofted loftier loftiest loftiness loftiness's lofting lofts lofty log log's logarithm logarithmic logged logger logging logic logic's logical logically logician logo logs loin loin's loincloth loincloth's loincloths loins loiter loitered loiterer loiterer's loiterers loitering loiters loll lolled lolling lollipop lollipop's lollipops lolls lone lonelier loneliest loneliness loneliness's lonely lonesome long long's longed longer longest longevity longevity's longhand longhand's longing longing's longings longish longitude longitude's longitudes longitudinal longs longshoreman longshoreman's longshoremen look look's looked looking lookout lookout's lookouts looks loom loom's loomed looming looms loon loon's loonier loonies looniest loons loony loony's loop loop's looped loophole loophole's loopholes looping loops loose loosed loosely loosen loosened loosening loosens looser looses loosest loosing loot loot's looted looting loots lop lope lope's loped lopes loping lopped lopping lops lopsided lord lord's lorded lording lords lore lore's lorries lorry lorry's lose loser loser's losers loses losing loss loss's losses lost lot lot's lotion lotion's lotions lots lotteries lottery lottery's lotus lotus's lotuses loud louder loudest loudly loudness loudness's loudspeaker loudspeaker's loudspeakers lounge lounge's lounged lounges lounging louse louse's louses lousier lousiest lousy lovable love love's loved lovelier lovelies loveliest loveliness loveliness's lovely lovely's lover lover's lovers loves loving lovingly low low's lowdown lowdown's lowed lower lowered lowering lowers lowest lowing lowlier lowliest lowly lows loyal loyaler loyalest loyalties loyalty loyalty's lozenge lozenge's lozenges lubricant lubricant's lubricants lubricate lubricated lubricates lubricating lubrication lubrication's lucid luck luck's lucked luckier luckiest luckily lucking lucks lucky lucrative ludicrous ludicrously lug lug's luggage luggage's lugged lugging lugs lukewarm lull lull's lullabies lullaby lullaby's lulled lulling lulls lumber lumber's lumbered lumbering lumberjack lumberjack's lumberjacks lumbers luminaries luminary luminary's luminous lump lump's lumped lumpier lumpiest lumping lumps lumpy lunacies lunacy lunacy's lunar lunatic lunatic's lunatics lunch lunch's lunched luncheon luncheon's luncheons lunches lunching lunchtime lung lung's lunge lunge's lunged lunges lunging lungs lupine lupine's lupines lurch lurch's lurched lurches lurching lure lure's lured lures lurid luring lurk lurked lurking lurks luscious lush lush's lusher lushes lushest lust lust's lusted luster luster's lustier lustiest lusting lustrous lusts lusty lute lute's lutes luxuriant luxuriate luxuriated luxuriates luxuriating luxuries luxurious luxury luxury's lye lye's lying lying's lymph lymph's lymphatic lymphatic's lymphatics lynch lynched lynches lynching lyre lyre's lyres lyric lyric's lyrical lyrics ma ma'am ma's macabre macaroni macaroni's macaronis mace mace's maced maces machete machete's machetes machine machine's machined machinery machinery's machines machining machinist machinist's machinists macho macing mackerel mackerel's mackerels macroscopic mad mad's madam madam's madame madame's madams madcap madcap's madcaps madden maddened maddening maddens madder maddest made madhouse madhouse's madhouses madly madman madman's madmen madness madness's mads maelstrom maelstrom's maelstroms magazine magazine's magazines magenta magenta's maggot maggot's maggots magic magic's magical magically magician magician's magicians magistrate magistrate's magistrates magnanimity magnanimity's magnanimous magnanimously magnate magnate's magnates magnesium magnesium's magnet magnet's magnetic magnetism magnetism's magnetize magnetized magnetizes magnetizing magnets magnificence magnificence's magnificent magnified magnifies magnify magnifying magnitude magnitude's magnitudes magnolia magnolia's magnolias magnum magpie magpie's magpies mahoganies mahogany mahogany's maid maid's maiden maiden's maidens maids mail mail's mailbox mailbox's mailboxes mailed mailing mailman mailman's mailmen mails maim maimed maiming maims main main's mainframe mainframe's mainframes mainland mainland's mainlands mainline mainly mains mainstay mainstay's mainstays mainstream maintain maintainability maintainable maintained maintainer maintainers maintaining maintains maintenance maintenance's maize maize's maizes majestic majestically majesties majesty majesty's major major's majored majoring majorities majority majority's majors make make's maker maker's makers makes makeshift makeshift's makeshifts makeup makeup's makeups making maladies maladjusted malady malady's malaria malaria's male male's males malevolence malevolence's malevolent malformed malfunction malice malice's malicious maliciously malign malignancies malignancy malignancy's malignant maligned maligning maligns mall mall's mallard mallard's mallards malleable mallet mallet's mallets malls malnutrition malnutrition's malpractice malpractice's malpractices malt malt's malted malting maltreat maltreated maltreating maltreats malts mama mama's mamas mamma mamma's mammal mammal's mammalian mammals mammoth mammoth's mammoths man man's manacle manacle's manacled manacles manacling manage manageable managed management management's manager manager's managerial managers manages managing mandate mandate's mandated mandates mandating mandatory mandible mandible's mandibles mandolin mandolin's mandolins mane mane's manes maneuver maneuver's maneuvered maneuvering maneuvers mange mange's manger manger's mangers mangier mangiest mangle mangle's mangled mangles mangling mango mango's mangoes mangrove mangrove's mangroves mangy manhandle manhandled manhandles manhandling manhole manhole's manholes manhood manhood's mania mania's maniac maniac's maniacal maniacs manias manic manicure manicure's manicured manicures manicuring manicurist manicurist's manicurists manifest manifest's manifestation manifestation's manifestations manifested manifesting manifestly manifesto manifesto's manifestos manifests manifold manifold's manifolded manifolding manifolds manipulate manipulated manipulates manipulating manipulation manipulation's manipulations mankind mankind's manlier manliest manliness manliness's manly manned mannequin mannequin's mannequins manner manner's mannerism mannerism's mannerisms manners manning mannish manor manor's manors manpower manpower's mans mansion mansion's mansions manslaughter manslaughter's mantel mantel's mantelpiece mantelpiece's mantelpieces mantels mantle mantle's mantled mantles mantling manual manual's manually manuals manufacture manufacture's manufactured manufacturer manufacturer's manufacturers manufactures manufacturing manure manure's manured manures manuring manuscript manuscript's manuscripts many many's map map's maple maple's maples mapped mapper mapping mappings maps mar marathon marathon's marathons marble marble's marbled marbles marbling march march's marched marcher marches marching mare mare's mares margarine margarine's margin margin's marginal marginally margins maria marigold marigold's marigolds marijuana marijuana's marina marina's marinas marinate marinated marinates marinating marine marine's mariner mariner's mariners marines marionette marionette's marionettes marital maritime mark mark's marked markedly marker marker's markers market market's marketable marketed marketing marketplace marketplace's marketplaces markets marking marking's markings marks marksman marksman's marksmen marmalade marmalade's maroon maroon's marooned marooning maroons marquee marquee's marquees marred marriage marriage's marriages married marries marring marrow marrow's marrows marry marrying mars marsh marsh's marshal marshal's marshaled marshaling marshals marshes marshier marshiest marshmallow marshmallow's marshmallows marshy marsupial marsupial's marsupials mart mart's martial martin marts martyr martyr's martyrdom martyrdom's martyred martyring martyrs marvel marvel's marveled marveling marvelous marvels mas mascara mascara's mascaraed mascaraing mascaras mascot mascot's mascots masculine masculine's masculines mash mash's mashed mashes mashing mask mask's masked masking masks masochist masochist's masochists mason mason's masonry masonry's masons masquerade masquerade's masqueraded masquerades masquerading mass mass's massacre massacre's massacred massacres massacring massage massage's massaged massages massaging massed masses massing massive massively mast mast's master master's mastered masterful mastering masterly mastermind mastermind's masterminded masterminding masterminds masterpiece masterpiece's masterpieces masters mastery mastery's masticate masticated masticates masticating masts masturbation mat mat's matador matador's matadors match match's matchbook matchbook's matchbooks matched matches matching matchless matchmaker matchmaker's matchmakers mate mate's mated material material's materialism materialism's materialist materialist's materialistic materialists materialize materialized materializes materializing materials maternal maternity maternity's mates math math's mathematical mathematically mathematician mathematician's mathematicians mathematics mathematics's maths matinee matinee's matinees mating matriarch matriarch's matriarchal matriarchs matrices matriculate matriculated matriculates matriculating matriculation matrimonial matrimony matrimony's matrix matrix's matron matron's matronly matrons mats matte matted matter matter's mattered mattering matters mattes matting matting's mattress mattress's mattresses mature matured maturer matures maturest maturing maturities maturity maturity's maudlin maul maul's mauled mauling mauls mausoleum mausoleum's mausoleums mauve mauve's maverick maverick's mavericks maxim maxim's maximal maximize maximized maximizes maximizing maxims maximum maximum's maximums may may's maybe maybe's maybes mayhem mayhem's mayonnaise mayonnaise's mayor mayor's mayors maze maze's mazes me meadow meadow's meadows meager meal meal's mealier mealiest meals mealy mean mean's meander meander's meandered meandering meanders meaner meanest meaning meaning's meaningful meaningless meanings means meant meantime meantime's meanwhile meanwhile's measles measles's measlier measliest measly measurable measure measure's measured measurement measurement's measurements measures measuring meat meat's meats mechanic mechanic's mechanical mechanically mechanics mechanics's mechanism mechanism's mechanisms mechanize mechanized mechanizes mechanizing medal medal's medallion medallion's medallions medals meddle meddled meddler meddler's meddlers meddles meddlesome meddling media media's median medias mediate mediated mediates mediating mediation mediation's mediator mediator's mediators medical medical's medically medicals medicate medicated medicates medicating medication medication's medications medicinal medicine medicine's medicines medieval mediocre mediocrities mediocrity mediocrity's meditate meditated meditates meditating meditation meditation's meditations medium medium's mediums medley medley's medleys meek meeker meekest meekly meekness meekness's meet meet's meeting meeting's meetings meets megabyte megabyte's megabytes megalomaniac megaphone megaphone's megaphoned megaphones megaphoning megaton megaton's megatons melancholy melancholy's mellow mellowed mellower mellowest mellowing mellows melodic melodies melodious melodrama melodrama's melodramas melodramatic melody melody's melon melon's melons melt melt's melted melting melts member member's members membership membership's memberships membrane membrane's membranes memento memento's mementos memo memo's memoir memoir's memoirs memorable memorably memorandum memorandum's memorandums memorial memorial's memorials memories memorize memorized memorizes memorizing memory memory's memos men menace menace's menaced menaces menacing menagerie menagerie's menageries mend mend's mended mending mends menial menial's menials menopause menopause's menstrual menstruate menstruated menstruates menstruating menstruation menstruation's mental mentalities mentality mentality's mentally menthol menthol's mention mention's mentioned mentioning mentions mentor mentor's mentored mentoring mentors menu menu's menus meow meow's meowed meowing meows mercantile mercenaries mercenary mercenary's merchandise merchandise's merchandised merchandises merchandising merchant merchant's merchants mercies merciful mercifully merciless mercilessly mercury mercury's mercy mercy's mere mere's merely meres merest merge merged merger merger's mergers merges merging meridian meridian's meridians meringue meringue's meringues merit merit's merited meriting merits mermaid mermaid's mermaids merrier merriest merrily merriment merriment's merry mes mesdames mesh mesh's meshed meshes meshing mess mess's message message's messages messed messenger messenger's messengers messes messier messiest messing messy met metabolic metabolism metabolism's metabolisms metal metal's metallic metallurgy metallurgy's metals metamorphose metamorphoses metamorphosis metamorphosis's metaphor metaphor's metaphorical metaphorically metaphors metaphysical metaphysics mete mete's meted meteor meteor's meteoric meteorite meteorite's meteorites meteorologist meteorologist's meteorologists meteorology meteorology's meteors meter meter's metered metering meters metes method method's methodical methodology methods meticulous meting metric metro metro's metropolis metropolis's metropolises metropolitan metros mettle mettle's mew mew's mewed mewing mews mezzanine mezzanine's mezzanines mice microbe microbe's microbes microbiology microbiology's microcode microcomputer microcomputer's microcomputers microfiche microfiche's microfilm microfilm's microfilmed microfilming microfilms micrometer micrometer's micrometers microorganism microorganism's microorganisms microphone microphone's microphones microprocessor microscope microscope's microscopes microscopic microsecond microsecond's microseconds microwave microwave's microwaved microwaves microwaving midday midday's middle middle's middleman middleman's middlemen middles midget midget's midgets midnight midnight's midriff midriff's midriffs midst midst's midstream midstream's midsummer midway midway's midways midwife midwife's midwifed midwifes midwifing midwives mien mien's miens might might's mightier mightiest mighty migraine migraine's migraines migrant migrant's migrants migrate migrated migrates migrating migration migration's migrations migratory mike mike's miked mikes miking mild mild's milder mildest mildew mildew's mildewed mildewing mildews mildly mile mile's mileage mileage's mileages miles milestone milestone's milestones militancy militancy's militant militant's militants militarily military military's militate militated militates militating militia militia's militias milk milk's milked milker milkier milkiest milking milkman milkman's milkmen milks milky mill mill's milled miller miller's millers milligram milligram's milligrams millimeter millimeter's millimeters milliner milliner's milliners millinery millinery's milling million million's millionaire millionaire's millionaires millions millionth millionth's millionths millisecond millisecond's milliseconds mills mime mime's mimed mimes mimic mimic's mimicked mimicking mimicries mimicry mimicry's mimics miming mince mince's minced mincemeat mincemeat's minces mincing mind mind's mindbogglingly minded mindedness mindful minding mindless mindlessly minds mine mine's mined minefield miner miner's mineral mineral's minerals miners mines mingle mingled mingles mingling miniature miniature's miniatures minibus minibus's minibuses minicomputer minimal minimalism minimalist minimally minimize minimized minimizes minimizing minimum minimum's minimums mining minion minion's minions minister minister's ministered ministerial ministering ministers ministries ministry ministry's mink mink's minks minnow minnow's minnows minor minor's minored minoring minorities minority minority's minors minstrel minstrel's minstrels mint mint's minted minting mints minuet minuet's minuets minus minus's minuscule minuscule's minuscules minuses minute minute's minuted minuter minutes minutest minuting miracle miracle's miracles miraculous miraculously mirage mirage's mirages mire mire's mired mires miring mirror mirror's mirrored mirroring mirrors mirth mirth's misadventure misadventure's misadventures misapprehension misappropriate misappropriated misappropriates misappropriating misappropriation misappropriation's misappropriations misbehave misbehaved misbehaves misbehaving misbehavior misbehavior's miscarriage miscarriage's miscarriages miscarried miscarries miscarry miscarrying miscellaneous miscellany mischief mischief's mischievous misconception misconception's misconceptions misconduct misconduct's misconducted misconducting misconducts misconstrue misconstrued misconstrues misconstruing misdeed misdeed's misdeeds misdemeanor misdemeanor's misdemeanors misdirect misdirected misdirecting misdirection misdirects miser miser's miserable miserably miseries miserly misers misery misery's misfit misfit's misfits misfitted misfitting misfortune misfortune's misfortunes misgiving misgiving's misgivings misguide misguided misguides misguiding mishap mishap's mishaps misinform misinformation misinformed misinforming misinforms misinterpret misinterpretation misinterpreted misinterpreting misinterprets misjudge misjudged misjudges misjudging mislaid mislay mislaying mislays mislead misleading misleads misled mismanagement mismatch mismatched mismatches mismatching misnomer misnomer's misnomers misplace misplaced misplaces misplacing misprint misprint's misprinted misprinting misprints misquote misquote's misquoted misquotes misquoting misread misreading misreads misrepresent misrepresentation misrepresentation's misrepresentations misrepresented misrepresenting misrepresents miss miss's missed misses misshapen missile missile's missiles missing mission mission's missionaries missionary missionary's missions missive missive's missives misspell misspelled misspelling misspelling's misspellings misspells mist mist's mistake mistake's mistaken mistakenly mistakes mistaking misted mistier mistiest misting mistletoe mistletoe's mistook mistress mistress's mistresses mistrust mistrust's mistrusted mistrusting mistrusts mists misty mistype mistyping misunderstand misunderstanding misunderstanding's misunderstandings misunderstands misunderstood misuse misuse's misused misuses misusing mite mite's mites mitigate mitigated mitigates mitigating mitt mitt's mitten mitten's mittens mitts mix mix's mixed mixer mixer's mixers mixes mixing mixture mixture's mixtures mnemonic mnemonic's mnemonics moan moan's moaned moaning moans moat moat's moats mob mob's mobbed mobbing mobile mobile's mobiles mobility mobility's mobilization mobilization's mobilizations mobilize mobilized mobilizes mobilizing mobs moccasin moccasin's moccasins mock mocked mockeries mockery mockery's mocking mockingbird mockingbird's mockingbirds mocks mod modal mode mode's model model's modeled modeling modelings models moderate moderate's moderated moderately moderates moderating moderation moderation's moderator moderator's moderators modern modern's modernity modernity's modernization modernization's modernize modernized modernizes modernizing moderns modes modest modestly modesty modesty's modicum modicum's modicums modification modification's modifications modified modifier modifier's modifiers modifies modify modifying modular modulate modulated modulates modulating modulation modulation's modulations module module's modules mohair mohair's moist moisten moistened moistening moistens moister moistest moisture moisture's molar molar's molars molasses molasses's mold mold's molded moldier moldiest molding molding's moldings molds moldy mole mole's molecular molecule molecule's molecules moles molest molested molesting molests mollified mollifies mollify mollifying mollusk mollusk's mollusks molt molt's molted molten molting molts mom mom's moment moment's momentarily momentary momentous moments momentum momentum's moms monarch monarch's monarchies monarchs monarchy monarchy's monasteries monastery monastery's monastic monastic's monastics monetarism monetary money money's mongoose mongrel mongrel's mongrels monies monitor monitor's monitored monitoring monitors monk monk's monkey monkey's monkeyed monkeying monkeys monks monochrome monogamous monogamy monogamy's monogram monogram's monogrammed monogramming monograms monolithic monologue monologue's monologues monopolies monopolize monopolized monopolizes monopolizing monopoly monopoly's monorail monorail's monorails monosyllable monosyllable's monosyllables monotonically monotonous monotony monotony's monsoon monsoon's monsoons monster monster's monsters monstrosities monstrosity monstrosity's monstrous month month's monthlies monthly monthly's months monument monument's monumental monuments moo moo's mood mood's moodier moodiest moodily moods moody mooed mooing moon moon's moonbeam moonbeam's moonbeams mooned mooning moonlight moonlight's moonlighted moonlighting moonlights moons moor moor's moored mooring mooring's moorings moors moos moose moose's moot mooted mooting moots mop mop's mope mope's moped mopes moping mopped mopping mops moral moral's morale morale's moralist moralist's moralists moralities morality morality's morally morals morass morass's morasses moratorium moratorium's moratoriums morbid more more's moreover morgue morgue's morgues morn morn's morning morning's mornings morns moron moron's moronic morons morose morphine morphine's morphology morsel morsel's morsels mortal mortal's mortality mortality's mortally mortals mortar mortar's mortared mortaring mortars mortgage mortgage's mortgaged mortgages mortgaging mortification mortification's mortified mortifies mortify mortifying mortuaries mortuary mortuary's mosaic mosaic's mosaics mosque mosque's mosques mosquito mosquito's mosquitoes moss moss's mosses mossier mossiest mossy most most's mostly motel motel's motels moth moth's mothball mothball's mothballed mothballing mothballs mother mother's mothered motherhood motherhood's mothering motherly mothers moths motif motif's motifs motion motion's motioned motioning motionless motions motivate motivated motivates motivating motivation motivation's motivations motive motive's motives motley motley's motleys motlier motliest motor motor's motorbike motorbike's motorbikes motorcade motorcade's motorcades motorcycle motorcycle's motorcycled motorcycles motorcycling motored motoring motorist motorist's motorists motorize motorized motorizes motorizing motors motorway motorway's motorways motto motto's mottoes mound mound's mounded mounding mounds mount mount's mountain mountain's mountaineer mountaineer's mountaineered mountaineering mountaineers mountainous mountains mounted mounting mounts mourn mourned mourner mourner's mourners mournful mourning mourning's mourns mouse mouse's moused mouses mousier mousiest mousing mousse mousse's moussed mousses moussing mousy mouth mouth's mouthed mouthful mouthful's mouthfuls mouthing mouthpiece mouthpiece's mouthpieces mouths movable movable's movables move move's moved movement movement's movements mover mover's movers moves movie movie's movies moving mow mow's mowed mower mower's mowers mowing mows much much's muck muck's mucked mucking mucks mucous mucus mucus's mud mud's muddied muddier muddies muddiest muddle muddle's muddled muddles muddling muddy muddying muff muff's muffed muffin muffin's muffing muffins muffle muffled muffler muffler's mufflers muffles muffling muffs mug mug's mugged mugger mugger's muggers muggier muggiest mugginess mugginess's mugging muggy mugs mulch mulch's mulched mulches mulching mule mule's mules mull mulled mulling mulls multi multinational multinational's multinationals multiple multiple's multiples multiplication multiplication's multiplications multiplicative multiplicities multiplicity multiplicity's multiplied multiplies multiply multiplying multiprocessing multitasking multitude multitude's multitudes mum mum's mumble mumble's mumbled mumbles mumbling mummies mummified mummifies mummify mummifying mummy mummy's mumps mumps's mums munch munched munches munching mundane municipal municipal's municipalities municipality municipality's municipals mural mural's murals murder murder's murdered murderer murderer's murderers murdering murderous murders murkier murkiest murky murmur murmur's murmured murmuring murmurs muscle muscle's muscled muscles muscling muscular muse muse's mused muses museum museum's museums mush mush's mushed mushes mushier mushiest mushing mushroom mushroom's mushroomed mushrooming mushrooms mushy music music's musical musical's musically musicals musician musician's musicians musing musk musk's musket musket's muskets muss muss's mussed mussel mussel's mussels musses mussing must must's mustache mustache's mustaches mustang mustang's mustangs mustard mustard's muster muster's mustered mustering musters mustier mustiest musts musty mutant mutant's mutants mutate mutated mutates mutating mutation mutation's mutations mute mute's muted mutely muter mutes mutest mutilate mutilated mutilates mutilating mutilation mutilation's mutilations muting mutinied mutinies mutinous mutiny mutiny's mutinying mutt mutt's mutter mutter's muttered muttering mutters mutton mutton's mutts mutual mutually muzzle muzzle's muzzled muzzles muzzling my myopic myriad myriad's myriads mys myself mysteries mysterious mysteriously mystery mystery's mystic mystic's mystical mysticism mysticism's mystics mystified mystifies mystify mystifying myth myth's mythical mythological mythologies mythology mythology's myths nab nabbed nabbing nabs nag nag's nagged nagging nags nail nail's nailed nailing nails naive naively naiver naivest naivete naivete's naivety naked nakedness nakedness's name name's named nameless namely names namesake namesake's namesakes naming nap nap's napalm napalm's napalmed napalming napalms nape nape's napes napkin napkin's napkins napped nappies napping nappy nappy's naps narcotic narcotic's narcotics narrate narrated narrates narrating narration narration's narrations narrative narrative's narratives narrator narrator's narrators narrow narrow's narrowed narrower narrowest narrowing narrowly narrowness narrowness's narrows nasal nasal's nasals nastier nastiest nastily nastiness nastiness's nasty nation nation's national national's nationalism nationalism's nationalist nationalist's nationalistic nationalists nationalities nationality nationality's nationalize nationalized nationalizes nationalizing nationally nationals nations nationwide native native's natives nativities nativity nativity's nattier nattiest natty natural natural's naturalist naturalist's naturalists naturalization naturalization's naturalize naturalized naturalizes naturalizing naturally naturalness naturalness's naturals nature nature's natures naught naught's naughtier naughtiest naughtily naughtiness naughtiness's naughts naughty nausea nausea's nauseate nauseated nauseates nauseating nauseous nautical naval navel navel's navels navies navigable navigate navigated navigates navigating navigation navigation's navigator navigator's navigators navy navy's nay nay's nays near nearby neared nearer nearest nearing nearly nears nearsighted nearsightedness nearsightedness's neat neater neatest neatly neatness neatness's nebula nebula's nebulae nebulous necessaries necessarily necessary necessary's necessitate necessitated necessitates necessitating necessities necessity necessity's neck neck's necked neckerchief neckerchief's neckerchiefs necking necklace necklace's necklaces neckline neckline's necklines necks necktie necktie's neckties necrophilia nectar nectar's nectarine nectarine's nectarines nee need need's needed needier neediest needing needle needle's needled needles needless needlessly needlework needlework's needling needs needy negate negated negates negating negation negation's negations negative negative's negatived negatively negatives negativing neglect neglect's neglected neglectful neglecting neglects negligee negligee's negligees negligence negligence's negligent negligently negligible negotiable negotiate negotiated negotiates negotiating negotiation negotiation's negotiations negotiator negotiator's negotiators neigh neigh's neighbor neighbor's neighbored neighborhood neighborhood's neighborhoods neighboring neighborliness neighborliness's neighborly neighbors neighed neighing neighs neither neon neon's neophyte neophyte's neophytes nephew nephew's nephews nepotism nepotism's nerve nerve's nerved nerves nerving nervous nervously nervousness nervousness's nest nest's nested nesting nestle nestled nestles nestling nests net net's nether nets netted netting netting's nettle nettle's nettled nettles nettling network network's networked networking networks neural neurologist neurologist's neurologists neurology neurology's neuron neuron's neurons neuroses neurosis neurosis's neurotic neurotic's neurotics neuter neuter's neutered neutering neuters neutral neutral's neutrality neutrality's neutralize neutralized neutralizes neutralizing neutrals neutron neutron's neutrons never nevertheless new new's newbie newbie's newbies newborn newborn's newborns newcomer newcomer's newcomers newer newest newfangled newly news news's newsagents newscast newscast's newscaster newscaster's newscasters newscasts newsier newsiest newsletter newsletter's newsletters newspaper newspaper's newspapers newsprint newsprint's newsstand newsstand's newsstands newsy newt newt's newton newts next next's nibble nibble's nibbled nibbles nibbling nice nicely nicer nicest niceties nicety nicety's niche niche's niches nick nick's nicked nickel nickel's nickels nicking nickname nickname's nicknamed nicknames nicknaming nicks nicotine nicotine's niece niece's nieces niftier niftiest nifty nigh night night's nightclub nightclub's nightclubbed nightclubbing nightclubs nightfall nightfall's nightgown nightgown's nightgowns nightingale nightingale's nightingales nightly nightmare nightmare's nightmares nightmarish nights nighttime nighttime's nil nil's nimble nimbler nimblest nimbly nincompoop nincompoop's nincompoops nine nine's nines nineteen nineteen's nineteens nineteenth nineteenth's nineteenths nineties ninetieth ninetieth's ninetieths ninety ninety's ninnies ninny ninny's ninth ninth's ninths nip nip's nipped nippier nippiest nipping nipple nipple's nipples nippy nips nit nit's nitrate nitrate's nitrated nitrates nitrating nitrogen nitrogen's nits nitwit nitwit's nitwits no no's nobility nobility's noble noble's nobleman nobleman's noblemen nobler nobles noblest noblewoman noblewoman's noblewomen nobly nobodies nobody nobody's nocturnal nod nod's nodded nodding node node's nodes nods noes noise noise's noised noiseless noiselessly noises noisier noisiest noisily noisiness noisiness's noising noisy nomad nomad's nomadic nomads nomenclature nomenclature's nomenclatures nominal nominally nominate nominated nominates nominating nomination nomination's nominations nominative nominative's nominatives nominee nominee's nominees non nonchalance nonchalance's nonchalant nonchalantly noncommittal nonconformist nonconformist's nonconformists nondescript none nonentities nonentity nonentity's nonetheless nonfiction nonfiction's nonflammable nonpartisan nonpartisan's nonpartisans nonprofit nonprofit's nonprofits nonresident nonresident's nonresidents nonsense nonsense's nonsensical nonstandard nonstop nontrivial nonviolence nonviolence's noodle noodle's noodled noodles noodling nook nook's nooks noon noon's noose noose's nooses nor norm norm's normal normal's normality normally norms north north's northeast northeast's northeasterly northeastern northerlies northerly northerly's northern northward northwest northwest's northwestern nose nose's nosebleed nosebleed's nosebleeds nosed noses nosier nosiest nosing nostalgia nostalgia's nostalgic nostril nostril's nostrils nosy not notable notable's notables notably notation notation's notations notch notch's notched notches notching note note's notebook notebook's notebooks noted notes noteworthy nothing nothing's nothingness nothings notice notice's noticeable noticeably noticeboard noticeboards noticed notices noticing notification notification's notifications notified notifies notify notifying noting notion notion's notional notions notoriety notoriety's notorious notoriously notwithstanding nougat nougat's nougats noun noun's nouns nourish nourished nourishes nourishing nourishment nourishment's nova novel novel's novelist novelist's novelists novels novelties novelty novelty's novice novice's novices now now's nowadays nowadays's nowhere nowhere's noxious nozzle nozzle's nozzles nuance nuance's nuances nuclear nuclei nucleus nucleus's nude nude's nuder nudes nudest nudge nudge's nudged nudges nudging nudity nudity's nugget nugget's nuggets nuisance nuisance's nuisances null nullified nullifies nullify nullifying nulls numb numbed number number's numbered numbering numbers numbest numbing numbness numbness's numbs numeral numeral's numerals numerate numerator numerator's numerators numeric numerical numerically numerous nun nun's nuns nuptial nuptial's nuptials nurse nurse's nursed nursemaid nursemaid's nursemaids nurseries nursery nursery's nurses nursing nurture nurture's nurtured nurtures nurturing nut nut's nutcracker nutcracker's nutcrackers nutmeg nutmeg's nutmegs nutrient nutrient's nutrients nutriment nutriment's nutriments nutrition nutrition's nutritional nutritious nuts nutshell nutshell's nutshells nutted nuttier nuttiest nutting nutty nuzzle nuzzle's nuzzled nuzzles nuzzling nylon nylon's nymph nymph's nymphs o'clock oaf oaf's oafs oak oak's oaks oar oar's oared oaring oars oases oasis oasis's oath oath's oaths oatmeal oatmeal's obedience obedience's obedient obediently obelisk obelisk's obelisks obese obesity obesity's obey obeyed obeying obeys obfuscation obituaries obituary obituary's object object's objected objecting objection objection's objectionable objections objective objective's objectively objectives objectivity objectivity's objector objector's objectors objects obligate obligated obligates obligating obligation obligation's obligations obligatory oblige obliged obliges obliging oblique oblique's obliques obliterate obliterated obliterates obliterating obliteration obliteration's oblivion oblivion's oblivious oblong oblong's oblongs obnoxious oboe oboe's oboes obscene obscener obscenest obscenities obscenity obscenity's obscure obscured obscurer obscures obscurest obscuring obscurities obscurity obscurity's observable observance observance's observances observant observation observation's observations observatories observatory observatory's observe observed observer observer's observers observes observing obsess obsessed obsesses obsessing obsession obsession's obsessions obsessive obsolescence obsolescence's obsolescent obsolete obsoleted obsoletes obsoleting obstacle obstacle's obstacles obstetrician obstetrician's obstetricians obstetrics obstetrics's obstinacy obstinacy's obstinate obstruct obstructed obstructing obstruction obstruction's obstructions obstructive obstructs obtain obtainable obtained obtaining obtains obtrusive obtuse obtuser obtusest obvious obviously occasion occasion's occasional occasionally occasioned occasioning occasions occupancy occupancy's occupant occupant's occupants occupation occupation's occupational occupations occupied occupies occupy occupying occur occurred occurrence occurrence's occurrences occurring occurs ocean ocean's oceanic oceanic's oceanography oceanography's oceans octagon octagon's octagonal octagons octal octave octave's octaves octopus octopus's octopuses ocular ocular's oculars odd odder oddest oddities oddity oddity's oddly odds odds's ode ode's odes odious odometer odometer's odometers odor odor's odors of off offbeat offbeat's offbeats offed offend offended offender offender's offenders offending offends offense offense's offenses offensive offensive's offensiveness offensives offer offer's offered offering offering's offerings offers offhand office office's officer officer's officers offices official official's officially officials officiate officiated officiates officiating officious offing offing's offings offload offs offset offset's offsets offsetting offshoot offshoot's offshoots offshore offspring offspring's offstage offstages often oftener oftenest ogle ogle's ogled ogles ogling ogre ogre's ogres oh oh's ohm ohm's ohms ohs oil oil's oiled oilier oiliest oiling oils oily ointment ointment's ointments okay okay's okaying okays okra okra's okras old old's olden older oldest olfactories olfactory olfactory's olive olive's olives omega omelet omelet's omelets omen omen's omens ominous ominously omission omission's omissions omit omits omitted omitting omnibus omnipotence omnipotence's omnipotent omnipresent omniscient on once once's oncoming one one's onerous ones oneself ongoing onion onion's onions onlooker onlooker's onlookers only onomatopoeia onomatopoeia's onrush onrush's onrushes onset onset's onsets onslaught onslaught's onslaughts onto onus onus's onuses onward oodles oodles's ooze ooze's oozed oozes oozing opal opal's opals opaque opaqued opaquer opaques opaquest opaquing open open's opened opener opener's openers openest opening opening's openings openly openness openness's opens opera opera's operand operands operas operate operated operates operatic operating operation operation's operational operations operative operative's operatives operator operator's operators ophthalmologist ophthalmologist's ophthalmologists ophthalmology ophthalmology's opinion opinion's opinionated opinions opium opium's opossum opossum's opossums opponent opponent's opponents opportune opportunist opportunist's opportunists opportunities opportunity opportunity's oppose opposed opposes opposing opposite opposite's opposites opposition opposition's oppress oppressed oppresses oppressing oppression oppression's oppressive oppressor oppressor's oppressors opt opted optic optic's optical optician optician's opticians optics optima optimal optimism optimism's optimist optimist's optimistic optimists optimization optimize optimized optimizes optimizing optimum optimum's optimums opting option option's optional optionally optioned optioning options optometrist optometrist's optometrists opts opulent opus opus's opuses or oracle oracle's oracles oral oral's orals orange orange's oranges orangutan orangutan's orangutans oration oration's orations orator orator's oratories orators oratory oratory's orbit orbit's orbital orbital's orbitals orbited orbiting orbits orchard orchard's orchards orchestra orchestra's orchestral orchestras orchestrate orchestrated orchestrates orchestrating orchestration orchestration's orchestrations orchid orchid's orchids ordain ordained ordaining ordains ordeal ordeal's ordeals order order's ordered ordering orderlies orderly orderly's orders ordinance ordinance's ordinances ordinaries ordinarily ordinary ordinary's ordination ordination's ordinations ore ore's ores organ organ's organic organic's organics organism organism's organisms organist organist's organists organization organization's organizational organizations organize organized organizer organizer's organizers organizes organizing organs orgasm orgies orgy orgy's orient orient's oriental orientate orientated orientates orientating orientation orientation's orientations oriented orienting orients orifice origin origin's original original's originality originality's originally originals originate originated originates originating originator originator's originators origins ornament ornament's ornamental ornamented ornamenting ornaments ornate ornately ornithologist ornithologist's ornithologists ornithology ornithology's orphan orphan's orphanage orphanage's orphanages orphaned orphaning orphans orthodontist orthodontist's orthodontists orthodox orthogonal orthogonality orthography orthopedics orthopedics's oscillate oscillated oscillates oscillating oscillation oscillation's oscillations oscilloscope osmosis osmosis's ostensible ostensibly ostentation ostentation's ostentatious ostracize ostracized ostracizes ostracizing ostrich ostrich's ostriches other others otherwise otter otter's otters ouch ought ounce ounce's ounces our ours ourselves oust ousted ouster ouster's ousters ousting ousts out out's outbound outbreak outbreak's outbreaks outburst outburst's outbursts outcast outcast's outcasts outclass outclassed outclasses outclassing outcome outcome's outcomes outcries outcry outcry's outdated outdid outdistance outdistanced outdistances outdistancing outdo outdoes outdoing outdone outdoor outdoors outdoors's outed outer outermost outfield outfield's outfields outfit outfit's outfits outfitted outfitting outgoing outgrew outgrow outgrowing outgrown outgrows outgrowth outgrowth's outgrowths outhouse outhouse's outhouses outing outing's outings outlaid outlandish outlast outlasted outlasting outlasts outlaw outlaw's outlawed outlawing outlaws outlay outlay's outlaying outlays outlet outlet's outlets outline outline's outlined outlines outlining outlive outlived outlives outliving outlook outlook's outlooks outlying outmoded outnumber outnumbered outnumbering outnumbers outpatient outpatient's outpatients outpost outpost's outposts output output's outputs outputted outputting outrage outrage's outraged outrageous outrageously outrages outraging outran outright outrun outrunning outruns outs outset outset's outsets outshine outshines outshining outshone outside outside's outsider outsider's outsiders outsides outskirt outskirt's outskirts outsmart outsmarted outsmarting outsmarts outspoken outstanding outstandingly outstation outstation's outstations outstrip outstripped outstripping outstrips outward outwardly outwards outweigh outweighed outweighing outweighs outwit outwits outwitted outwitting ova oval oval's ovals ovaries ovary ovary's ovation ovation's ovations oven oven's ovens over over's overall overall's overalls overalls's overate overbear overbearing overbears overblown overboard overbore overborne overburden overburdened overburdening overburdens overcame overcast overcast's overcasting overcasts overcharge overcharge's overcharged overcharges overcharging overcoat overcoat's overcoats overcome overcomes overcoming overcrowd overcrowded overcrowding overcrowds overdid overdo overdoes overdoing overdone overdose overdose's overdosed overdoses overdosing overdraft overdraw overdrawing overdrawn overdraws overdrew overdue overeat overeaten overeating overeats overestimate overestimate's overestimated overestimates overestimating overflow overflow's overflowed overflowing overflows overgrew overgrow overgrowing overgrown overgrows overhand overhand's overhands overhang overhang's overhanging overhangs overhaul overhaul's overhauled overhauling overhauls overhead overhead's overheads overhear overheard overhearing overhears overheat overheated overheating overheats overhung overkill overlaid overlain overland overlap overlap's overlapped overlapping overlaps overlay overlaying overlays overlie overlies overload overload's overloaded overloading overloads overlong overlook overlook's overlooked overlooking overlooks overly overlying overnight overnight's overnights overpass overpass's overpasses overpopulation overpower overpowered overpowering overpowers overprice overpriced overprices overpricing overprint overprinted overprinting overprints overran overrate overrated overrates overrating overreact overreacted overreacting overreacts overridden override override's overrides overriding overrode overrule overruled overrules overruling overrun overrun's overrunning overruns overs oversampling oversaw overseas oversee overseeing overseen overseer overseer's overseers oversees overshadow overshadowed overshadowing overshadows overshoot overshooting overshoots overshot oversight oversight's oversights oversimplification oversleep oversleeping oversleeps overslept overstate overstated overstates overstating overstep overstepped overstepping oversteps overt overtake overtaken overtakes overtaking overthrew overthrow overthrow's overthrowing overthrown overthrows overtime overtime's overtimes overtly overtone overtone's overtones overtook overture overture's overtures overturn overturned overturning overturns overuse overused overuses overusing overview overweight overweight's overwhelm overwhelmed overwhelming overwhelmingly overwhelms overwork overwork's overworked overworking overworks overwrite overwrites overwriting overwritten overwrought ovum ovum's owe owed owes owing owl owl's owls own owned owner owner's owners ownership ownership's owning owns ox ox's oxen oxidation oxidation's oxide oxide's oxides oxidize oxidized oxidizes oxidizing oxygen oxygen's oyster oyster's oysters ozone ozone's pa pa's pace pace's paced pacemaker pacemaker's pacemakers paces pacific pacified pacifier pacifier's pacifiers pacifies pacifism pacifism's pacifist pacifist's pacifists pacify pacifying pacing pack pack's package package's packaged packages packaging packed packer packer's packers packet packet's packets packing packs pact pact's pacts pad pad's padded paddies padding padding's paddle paddle's paddled paddles paddling paddock paddock's paddocked paddocking paddocks paddy paddy's padlock padlock's padlocked padlocking padlocks pads pagan pagan's pagans page page's pageant pageant's pageantry pageantry's pageants paged pager pages pagination paging pagoda pagoda's pagodas paid pail pail's pails pain pain's pained painful painfuller painfullest painfully paining painless painlessly pains painstaking painstaking's paint paint's painted painter painting painting's paintings paints pair pair's paired pairing pairs pajamas pajamas's pal pal's palace palace's palaces palatable palate palate's palates palatial pale pale's paled paleontologist paleontologist's paleontologists paleontology paleontology's paler pales palest palette palette's palettes paling pall pall's pallbearer pallbearer's pallbearers palled pallid palling pallor pallor's palls palm palm's palmed palming palms palomino palomino's palominos palpable palpably pals paltrier paltriest paltry pamper pampered pampering pampers pamphlet pamphlet's pamphlets pan pan's panacea panacea's panaceas pancake pancake's pancaked pancakes pancaking pancreas pancreas's pancreases pancreatic panda panda's pandas pandemonium pandemonium's pander pander's pandered pandering panders pane pane's panel panel's paneled paneling paneling's panels panes pang pang's pangs panhandle panhandle's panhandled panhandler panhandler's panhandlers panhandles panhandling panic panic's panicked panicking panicky panics panned panning panorama panorama's panoramas panoramic pans pansies pansy pansy's pant pant's panted panther panther's panthers pantie pantie's panties panting pantomime pantomime's pantomimed pantomimes pantomiming pantries pantry pantry's pants pap papa papa's papacies papacy papacy's papal papas papaya papaya's papayas paper paper's paperback paperback's paperbacks papered papering papers paperweight paperweight's paperweights paperwork paprika paprika's papyri papyrus papyrus's par par's parable parable's parables parachute parachute's parachuted parachutes parachuting parade parade's paraded parades paradigm parading paradise paradise's paradises paradox paradox's paradoxes paradoxical paradoxically paraffin paraffin's paragon paragon's paragons paragraph paragraph's paragraphed paragraphing paragraphs parakeet parakeet's parakeets parallel parallel's paralleled paralleling parallels paralyses paralysis paralysis's paralytic paralytic's paralytics paralyze paralyzed paralyzes paralyzing parameter parameter's parameters paramount paranoia paranoid paranoid's paranoids paraphernalia paraphernalia's paraphrase paraphrase's paraphrased paraphrases paraphrasing paraplegic paraplegic's paraplegics parasite parasite's parasites parasitic parasol parasol's parasols paratrooper paratrooper's paratroopers parcel parcel's parceled parceling parcels parch parched parches parching parchment parchment's parchments pardon pardon's pardonable pardoned pardoning pardons pare pared parent parent's parentage parentage's parental parented parentheses parenthesis parenthesis's parenthetical parenthood parenthood's parenting parents pares paring parish parish's parishes parishioner parishioner's parishioners parity parity's park park's parka parka's parkas parked parking parks parkway parkway's parkways parliament parliament's parliamentary parliaments parlor parlor's parlors parochial parodied parodies parody parody's parodying parole parole's paroled paroles paroling parred parring parrot parrot's parroted parroting parrots pars parse parsec parsec's parsecs parsed parser parses parsing parsley parsley's parsnip parsnip's parsnips parson parson's parsonage parsonage's parsonages parsons part part's partake partaken partakes partaking parted partial partial's partiality partiality's partially partials participant participant's participants participate participated participates participating participation participation's participle participle's participles particle particle's particles particular particular's particularly particulars partied parties parting parting's partings partisan partisan's partisans partition partition's partitioned partitioning partitions partly partner partner's partnered partnering partners partnership partnership's partnerships partook partridge partridge's partridges parts party party's partying pas pass pass's passable passage passage's passages passageway passageway's passageways passbook passbook's passbooks passe passed passenger passenger's passengers passer passes passing passing's passion passion's passionate passionately passions passive passive's passively passives passport passport's passports password password's passwords past past's pasta pasta's pastas paste paste's pasted pastel pastel's pastels pastes pasteurization pasteurization's pasteurize pasteurized pasteurizes pasteurizing pastiche pastier pasties pastiest pastime pastime's pastimes pasting pastor pastor's pastoral pastoral's pastorals pastors pastries pastry pastry's pasts pasture pasture's pastured pastures pasturing pasty pasty's pat pat's patch patch's patched patches patching patchwork patchwork's patchworks patchy pate pate's patent patent's patented patenting patently patents paternal paternalism paternalism's paternity paternity's pates path path's pathetic pathetically pathological pathologist pathologist's pathologists pathology pathology's pathos pathos's paths pathway pathway's pathways patience patience's patient patient's patienter patientest patiently patients patio patio's patios patriarch patriarch's patriarchal patriarchs patrimonies patrimony patrimony's patriot patriot's patriotic patriotism patriotism's patriots patrol patrol's patrolled patrolling patrols patron patron's patronage patronage's patronages patronize patronized patronizes patronizing patrons pats patted patter patter's pattered pattering pattern pattern's patterned patterning patterns patters patties patting patty patty's paucity paucity's paunch paunch's paunches paunchier paunchiest paunchy pauper pauper's paupers pause pause's paused pauses pausing pave paved pavement pavement's pavements paves pavilion pavilion's pavilions paving paw paw's pawed pawing pawn pawn's pawnbroker pawnbroker's pawnbrokers pawned pawning pawns paws pay pay's payable payed payer payer's payers paying payload payment payment's payments payoff payoff's payoffs payroll payroll's payrolls pays pea pea's peace peace's peaceable peaceful peacefully peacemaker peacemaker's peacemakers peaces peach peach's peaches peacock peacock's peacocks peak peak's peaked peaking peaks peal peal's pealed pealing peals peanut peanut's peanuts pear pear's pearl pearl's pearled pearling pearls pears peas peasant peasant's peasants peat peat's pebble pebble's pebbled pebbles pebbling pecan pecan's pecans peck peck's pecked pecking pecks peculiar peculiarities peculiarity peculiarity's peculiarly pedagogy pedagogy's pedal pedal's pedaled pedaling pedals pedant pedant's pedantic pedantry pedants peddle peddled peddler peddler's peddlers peddles peddling pedestal pedestal's pedestals pedestrian pedestrian's pedestrians pediatrician pediatrician's pediatricians pediatrics pediatrics's pedigree pedigree's pedigrees peek peek's peeked peeking peeks peel peel's peeled peeling peels peep peep's peeped peeping peeps peer peer's peered peering peerless peers peeve peeve's peeved peeves peeving peevish peg peg's pegged pegging pegs pelican pelican's pelicans pellet pellet's pelleted pelleting pellets pelt pelt's pelted pelting pelts pelvic pelvis pelvis's pelvises pen pen's penal penalize penalized penalizes penalizing penalties penalty penalty's penance penance's penances pence penchant pencil pencil's penciled penciling pencils pend pendant pendant's pendants pended pending pends pendulum pendulum's pendulums penetrate penetrated penetrates penetrating penetration penetration's penetrations penguin penguin's penguins penicillin penicillin's peninsula peninsula's peninsulas penis penis's penises penitence penitence's penitent penitent's penitentiaries penitentiary penitentiary's penitents penknife penknife's penknives penmanship penmanship's pennant pennant's pennants penned pennies penniless penning penny penny's pens pension pension's pensioned pensioner pensioner's pensioners pensioning pensions pensive pensively pentagon pentagon's pentagonal pentagons penthouse penthouse's penthouses penultimate peon peon's peonies peons peony peony's people people's peopled peoples peopling pep pep's pepped pepper pepper's peppered peppering peppermint peppermint's peppermints peppers pepping peps per perceive perceived perceives perceiving percent percent's percentage percentage's percentages percents perceptible perception perception's perceptions perceptive perch perch's perchance perched perches perching percolate percolated percolates percolating percolation percolator percolator's percolators percussion percussion's peremptory perennial perennial's perennials perfect perfect's perfected perfecter perfectest perfecting perfection perfection's perfectionist perfectionist's perfectionists perfections perfectly perfects perforate perforated perforates perforating perforation perforation's perforations perform performance performance's performances performed performer performer's performers performing performs perfume perfume's perfumed perfumes perfuming perfunctorily perfunctory perhaps peril peril's periled periling perilous perilously perils perimeter perimeter's perimeters period period's periodic periodical periodical's periodically periodicals periods peripheral peripheral's peripherals peripheries periphery periphery's periscope periscope's periscopes perish perishable perishable's perishables perished perishes perishing perjure perjured perjures perjuries perjuring perjury perjury's perk perk's perked perkier perkiest perking perks perky permanence permanence's permanent permanent's permanently permanents permeate permeated permeates permeating permissible permission permission's permissions permissive permit permit's permits permitted permitting permutation permutation's permutations pernicious peroxide peroxide's peroxided peroxides peroxiding perpendicular perpendicular's perpendiculars perpetrate perpetrated perpetrates perpetrating perpetrator perpetrator's perpetrators perpetual perpetual's perpetually perpetuals perpetuate perpetuated perpetuates perpetuating perplex perplexed perplexes perplexing perplexities perplexity perplexity's persecute persecuted persecutes persecuting persecution persecution's persecutions persecutor persecutor's persecutors perseverance perseverance's persevere persevered perseveres persevering persist persisted persistence persistence's persistent persistently persisting persists person person's persona personable personal personal's personalities personality personality's personalize personalized personalizes personalizing personally personals personification personification's personifications personified personifies personify personifying personnel personnel's persons perspective perspective's perspectives perspiration perspiration's perspire perspired perspires perspiring persuade persuaded persuades persuading persuasion persuasion's persuasions persuasive persuasively pert pertain pertained pertaining pertains perter pertest pertinent perturb perturbed perturbing perturbs perusal perusal's perusals peruse perused peruses perusing pervade pervaded pervades pervading pervasive perverse perversion perversion's perversions pervert pervert's perverted perverting perverts peskier peskiest pesky pessimism pessimism's pessimist pessimist's pessimistic pessimists pest pest's pester pestered pestering pesters pesticide pesticide's pesticides pestilence pestilence's pestilences pests pet pet's petal petal's petals peter peter's petered petering peters petite petite's petites petition petition's petitioned petitioning petitions petrified petrifies petrify petrifying petrol petrol's petroleum petroleum's pets petted petticoat petticoat's petticoats pettier pettiest pettiness pettiness's petting petty petulant petunia petunia's petunias pew pew's pews pewter pewter's pewters phantom phantom's phantoms pharmaceutical pharmaceutical's pharmaceuticals pharmacies pharmacist pharmacist's pharmacists pharmacy pharmacy's phase phase's phased phases phasing pheasant pheasant's pheasants phenomena phenomenal phenomenally phenomenon phenomenon's phenomenons philanthropic philanthropies philanthropist philanthropist's philanthropists philanthropy philanthropy's philosopher philosopher's philosophers philosophical philosophies philosophize philosophized philosophizes philosophizing philosophy philosophy's phlegm phlegm's phlegmatic phobia phobia's phobias phoenix phone phone's phoned phones phonetic phonetics phonetics's phonics phonics's phonied phonier phonies phoniest phoning phonograph phonograph's phonographs phony phony's phonying phosphor phosphorescence phosphorescence's phosphorescent phosphorus phosphorus's photo photo's photocopied photocopier photocopier's photocopiers photocopies photocopy photocopy's photocopying photoed photogenic photograph photograph's photographed photographer photographer's photographers photographic photographing photographs photography photography's photoing photon photon's photons photos photosynthesis photosynthesis's phototypesetter phrase phrase's phrased phraseology phrases phrasing physic physical physical's physically physicals physician physician's physicians physicist physicist's physicists physics physics's physiological physiology physiology's physique physique's physiques pi pi's pianist pianist's pianists piano piano's pianos piccolo piccolo's piccolos pick pick's pickax pickax's pickaxed pickaxes pickaxing picked picket picket's picketed picketing pickets pickier pickiest picking pickle pickle's pickled pickles pickling pickpocket pickpocket's pickpockets picks pickup pickup's pickups picky picnic picnic's picnicked picnicking picnics pictorial pictorial's pictorials picture picture's pictured pictures picturesque picturing piddle piddled piddles piddling pie pie's piece piece's pieced piecemeal pieces piecework piecework's piecing pier pier's pierce pierced pierces piercing piers pies piety piety's pig pig's pigeon pigeon's pigeonhole pigeonhole's pigeonholed pigeonholes pigeonholing pigeons pigged pigging piggish piggyback piggyback's piggybacked piggybacking piggybacks pigheaded pigment pigment's pigments pigpen pigpen's pigpens pigs pigtail pigtail's pigtails pike pike's piked pikes piking pile pile's piled piles pilfer pilfered pilfering pilfers pilgrim pilgrim's pilgrimage pilgrimage's pilgrimages pilgrims piling pill pill's pillage pillage's pillaged pillages pillaging pillar pillar's pillars pilled pilling pillow pillow's pillowcase pillowcase's pillowcases pillowed pillowing pillows pills pilot pilot's piloted piloting pilots pimple pimple's pimples pimplier pimpliest pimply pin pin's pinch pinch's pinched pinches pinching pincushion pincushion's pincushions pine pine's pineapple pineapple's pineapples pined pines pining pinion pinion's pinioned pinioning pinions pink pink's pinked pinker pinkest pinking pinks pinnacle pinnacle's pinnacles pinned pinning pinpoint pinpoint's pinpointed pinpointing pinpoints pins pint pint's pints pioneer pioneer's pioneered pioneering pioneers pious pipe pipe's piped pipeline pipeline's pipelines pipes piping piping's pique pique's piqued piques piquing piracy piracy's piranha piranha's piranhas pirate pirate's pirated pirates pirating pirouette pirouette's pirouetted pirouettes pirouetting pis pistachio pistachio's pistachios pistol pistol's pistols piston piston's pistons pit pit's pitch pitch's pitched pitcher pitcher's pitchers pitches pitchfork pitchfork's pitchforked pitchforking pitchforks pitching piteous piteously pitfall pitfall's pitfalls pithier pithiest pithy pitied pities pitiful pitifully pitiless pits pittance pittance's pittances pitted pitting pity pity's pitying pivot pivot's pivotal pivoted pivoting pivots pixie pixie's pixies pizza pizza's pizzas placard placard's placarded placarding placards placate placated placates placating place place's placed placement placenta placenta's placentas places placid placidly placing plagiarism plagiarism's plagiarisms plagiarist plagiarist's plagiarists plagiarize plagiarized plagiarizes plagiarizing plague plague's plagued plagues plaguing plaice plaid plaid's plaids plain plain's plainer plainest plainly plains plaintiff plaintiff's plaintiffs plaintive plan plan's planar plane plane's planed planes planet planet's planetarium planetarium's planetariums planetary planets planing plank plank's planked planking planks plankton plankton's planned planner planner's planners planning plans plant plant's plantain plantain's plantains plantation plantation's plantations planted planter planter's planters planting plants plaque plaque's plaques plasma plasma's plaster plaster's plastered plastering plasters plastic plastic's plastics plate plate's plateau plateau's plateaued plateauing plateaus plated plates platform platform's platformed platforming platforms plating platinum platinum's platitude platitude's platitudes platoon platoon's platooned platooning platoons platter platter's platters plausibility plausible plausibly play play's playable playback played player player's players playful playfully playfulness playfulness's playground playground's playgrounds playhouse playhouse's playhouses playing playmate playmate's playmates playpen playpen's playpens plays plaything plaything's playthings playwright playwright's playwrights plaza plaza's plazas plea plea's plead pleaded pleading pleads pleas pleasant pleasanter pleasantest pleasantly pleasantries pleasantry pleasantry's please pleased pleases pleasing pleasings pleasurable pleasure pleasure's pleasured pleasures pleasuring pleat pleat's pleated pleating pleats pledge pledge's pledged pledges pledging plentiful plentifully plenty plenty's plethora pliable pliant plied pliers pliers's plies plight plight's plighted plighting plights plod plodded plodding plods plop plop's plopped plopping plops plot plot's plots plotted plotter plotter's plotters plotting plow plow's plowed plowing plows ploy ploy's ploys pluck pluck's plucked plucking plucks plucky plug plug's plugged plugging plugs plum plum's plumage plumage's plumb plumbed plumber plumber's plumbers plumbing plumbing's plumbs plume plume's plumed plumes pluming plummer plummest plummet plummet's plummeted plummeting plummets plump plump's plumped plumper plumpest plumping plumps plums plunder plunder's plundered plundering plunders plunge plunge's plunged plunger plunger's plungers plunges plunging plural plural's plurality plurals plus plus's pluses plush plush's plusher plushest plutonium plutonium's ply ply's plying plywood plywood's pneumatic pneumonia pneumonia's poach poached poacher poacher's poachers poaches poaching pocket pocket's pocketbook pocketbook's pocketbooks pocketed pocketing pockets pockmark pockmark's pockmarked pockmarking pockmarks pod pod's podded podding podium podium's podiums pods poem poem's poems poet poet's poetic poetical poetry poetry's poets poignancy poignancy's poignant poinsettia poinsettia's poinsettias point point's pointed pointedly pointer pointer's pointers pointing pointless pointlessly points poise poise's poised poises poising poison poison's poisoned poisoning poisonous poisons poke poke's poked poker poker's pokers pokes pokey pokier pokiest poking poky polar polarity polarization polarization's polarize polarized polarizes polarizing pole pole's poled polemic polemic's polemics poles police police's policed policeman policeman's policemen polices policewoman policewoman's policewomen policies policing policy policy's poling polio polio's polios polish polish's polished polishes polishing polite politely politeness politeness's politer politest political politically politician politician's politicians politics politics's polka polka's polkaed polkaing polkas poll poll's polled pollen pollen's pollinate pollinated pollinates pollinating pollination pollination's polling polls pollster pollster's pollsters pollutant pollutant's pollutants pollute polluted pollutes polluting pollution pollution's polo polo's polygamous polygamy polygamy's polygon polygon's polygons polynomial polynomial's polynomials polyp polyp's polyps polytechnic pomegranate pomegranate's pomegranates pomp pomp's pompous poncho poncho's ponchos pond pond's ponder pondered pondering ponderous ponders ponds ponies pontoon pontoon's pontoons pony pony's poodle poodle's poodles pool pool's pooled pooling pools poop poop's pooped pooping poops poor poorer poorest poorly pop pop's popcorn popcorn's pope poplar poplar's poplars popped poppies popping poppy poppy's pops populace populace's populaces popular popularity popularity's popularize popularized popularizes popularizing popularly populate populated populates populating population population's populations populous porcelain porcelain's porch porch's porches porcupine porcupine's porcupines pore pore's pored pores poring pork pork's pornographic pornography pornography's porous porpoise porpoise's porpoised porpoises porpoising porridge porridge's port port's portability portable portable's portables portal portal's portals ported portend portended portending portends portent portent's portents porter porter's porters portfolio portfolio's portfolios porthole porthole's portholes portico portico's porticoes porting portion portion's portioned portioning portions portlier portliest portly portrait portrait's portraits portray portrayal portrayal's portrayals portrayed portraying portrays ports pose pose's posed poses posies posing position position's positional positioned positioning positions positive positive's positively positives positivism possess possessed possesses possessing possession possession's possessions possessive possessive's possessives possessor possessor's possessors possibilities possibility possibility's possible possible's possibles possibly possum possum's possums post post's postage postage's postal postbox postcard postcard's postcards postcode posted poster poster's posterior posterior's posteriors posterity posterity's posters postgraduate postgraduate's postgraduates posthumous posthumously posting postman postman's postmark postmark's postmarked postmarking postmarks postmaster postmaster's postmasters postmen postpone postponed postponement postponement's postponements postpones postponing posts postscript postscript's postscripts postulate postulate's postulated postulates postulating posture posture's postured postures posturing posy posy's pot pot's potassium potassium's potato potato's potatoes potency potency's potent potential potential's potentially pothole pothole's potholes potion potion's potions pots potted potter potter's pottered potteries pottering potters pottery pottery's potting pouch pouch's pouched pouches pouching poultry poultry's pounce pounce's pounced pounces pouncing pound pound's pounded pounding pounds pour poured pouring pours pout pout's pouted pouting pouts poverty poverty's powder powder's powdered powdering powders powdery power power's powered powerful powerfully powerhouse powerhouse's powerhouses powering powerless powers powwow powwow's powwowed powwowing powwows practicable practical practical's practicalities practicality practicality's practically practicals practice practice's practiced practices practicing practitioner practitioner's practitioners pragmatic pragmatic's pragmatics pragmatism prairie prairie's prairies praise praise's praised praises praiseworthy praising pram prance prance's pranced prances prancing prank prank's pranks prattle prattle's prattled prattles prattling prawn prawn's prawned prawning prawns pray prayed prayer prayer's prayers praying prays preach preached preacher preacher's preachers preaches preaching preamble preamble's preambled preambles preambling precarious precariously precaution precaution's precautionary precautions precede preceded precedence precedence's precedent precedent's precedents precedes preceding precinct precinct's precincts precious precipice precipice's precipices precipitate precipitate's precipitated precipitates precipitating precipitation precipitation's precipitations precipitous precis precis's precise precisely preciser precisest precision precision's preclude precluded precludes precluding precocious preconceive preconceived preconceives preconceiving preconception preconception's preconceptions precursor precursor's precursors predator predator's predators predatory predecessor predecessor's predecessors predefined predestination predestination's predicament predicament's predicaments predicate predicate's predicated predicates predicating predict predictable predictably predicted predicting prediction prediction's predictions predictor predicts predisposition predisposition's predispositions predominance predominance's predominant predominantly predominate predominated predominates predominating preeminence preeminence's preeminent preempt preempted preempting preempts preen preened preening preens prefab prefab's prefabbed prefabbing prefabs preface preface's prefaced prefaces prefacing prefect prefer preferable preferably preference preference's preferences preferential preferred preferring prefers prefix prefix's prefixed prefixes prefixing pregnancies pregnancy pregnancy's pregnant prehistoric prejudice prejudice's prejudiced prejudices prejudicial prejudicing preliminaries preliminary preliminary's prelude prelude's preludes premature prematurely premeditation premeditation's premier premier's premiere premiere's premiered premieres premiering premiers premise premise's premised premises premising premium premium's premiums premonition premonition's premonitions prenatal preoccupied preoccupies preoccupy preoccupying prepaid preparation preparation's preparations preparatory prepare prepared prepares preparing prepay prepaying prepays preponderance preponderance's preponderances preposition preposition's prepositional prepositions preposterous prerequisite prerequisite's prerequisites prerogative prerogative's prerogatives prescribe prescribed prescribes prescribing prescription prescription's prescriptions presence presence's presences present present's presentable presentation presentation's presentations presented presenter presenting presently presents preservation preservation's preservative preservative's preservatives preserve preserve's preserved preserves preserving preside presided presidencies presidency presidency's president president's presidential presidents presides presiding press press's pressed presses pressing pressing's pressings pressure pressure's pressured pressures pressuring prestige prestige's prestigious presto presumably presume presumed presumes presuming presumption presumption's presumptions presumptuous presuppose presupposed presupposes presupposing pretend pretended pretender pretender's pretenders pretending pretends pretense pretense's pretenses pretension pretension's pretensions pretentious pretentiously pretentiousness pretentiousness's pretext pretext's pretexts prettied prettier pretties prettiest pretty pretty's prettying pretzel pretzel's pretzels prevail prevailed prevailing prevails prevalence prevalence's prevalent prevent preventable prevented preventing prevention prevention's preventive preventive's preventives prevents preview preview's previewed previewer previewers previewing previews previous previously prey prey's preyed preying preys price price's priced priceless prices pricing prick prick's pricked pricking prickle prickle's prickled prickles pricklier prickliest prickling prickly pricks pride pride's prided prides priding pried pries priest priest's priestess priestess's priestesses priesthood priesthood's priesthoods priests prim primal primaries primarily primary primary's primate primate's primates prime prime's primed primer primer's primers primes primeval priming primitive primitive's primitives primly primmer primmest primp primped primping primps primrose primrose's primroses prince prince's princes princess princess's princesses principal principal's principalities principality principality's principally principals principle principle's principles print print's printable printed printer printer's printers printing printing's printings printout printout's printouts prints prior prior's priorities priority priority's priors prism prism's prisms prison prison's prisoner prisoner's prisoners prisons privacy privacy's private private's privately privater privates privatest privation privation's privations privatization privatize privatized privatizes privatizing privier privies priviest privilege privilege's privileged privileges privileging privy privy's prize prize's prized prizes prizing pro pro's probabilistic probabilities probability probability's probable probable's probables probably probation probation's probe probe's probed probes probing problem problem's problematic problems procedural procedure procedure's procedures proceed proceeded proceeding proceeding's proceedings proceeds proceeds's process process's processed processes processing procession procession's processional processional's processionals processioned processioning processions processor processor's processors proclaim proclaimed proclaiming proclaims proclamation proclamation's proclamations procrastinate procrastinated procrastinates procrastinating procrastination procrastination's procure procured procurement procures procuring prod prod's prodded prodding prodigal prodigal's prodigals prodigies prodigious prodigy prodigy's prods produce produce's produced producer producer's producers produces producing product product's production production's productions productive productivity products profane profaned profanes profaning profanities profanity profanity's profess professed professes professing profession profession's professional professional's professionally professionals professions professor professor's professors proffer proffer's proffered proffering proffers proficiency proficiency's proficient proficient's proficiently proficients profile profile's profiled profiles profiling profit profit's profitable profited profiteer profiteer's profiteered profiteering profiteers profiting profits profound profounder profoundest profoundly profundities profundity profundity's profuse profusely profusion profusion's profusions progeny progeny's prognoses prognosis prognosis's program program's programmable programmed programmer programmer's programmers programming programs progress progress's progressed progresses progressing progression progression's progressions progressive progressive's progressively progressives prohibit prohibited prohibiting prohibition prohibition's prohibitions prohibitive prohibitively prohibits project project's projected projectile projectile's projectiles projecting projection projection's projections projector projector's projectors projects proletarian proletarian's proletarians proletariat proletariat's proliferate proliferated proliferates proliferating proliferation proliferation's prolific prologue prologue's prologues prolong prolonged prolonging prolongs prom prom's promenade promenade's promenaded promenades promenading prominence prominence's prominent prominently promiscuity promiscuity's promiscuous promise promise's promised promises promising promontories promontory promontory's promote promoted promotes promoting promotion promotion's promotions prompt prompt's prompted prompter promptest prompting promptly promptness promptness's prompts proms promulgate promulgated promulgates promulgating prone prong prong's prongs pronoun pronoun's pronounce pronounced pronouncement pronouncement's pronouncements pronounces pronouncing pronouns pronunciation pronunciation's pronunciations proof proof's proofed proofing proofread proofreading proofreads proofs prop prop's propaganda propaganda's propagate propagated propagates propagating propagation propagation's propel propelled propeller propeller's propellers propelling propels propensities propensity propensity's proper proper's properer properest properly properties property property's prophecies prophecy prophecy's prophesied prophesies prophesy prophesy's prophesying prophet prophet's prophetic prophets proponent proponent's proponents proportion proportion's proportional proportionality proportionally proportionals proportionate proportioned proportioning proportions proposal proposal's proposals propose proposed proposes proposing proposition proposition's propositional propositioned propositioning propositions propped propping proprietaries proprietary proprietary's proprietor proprietor's proprietors propriety propriety's props propulsion propulsion's pros prose prose's prosecute prosecuted prosecutes prosecuting prosecution prosecution's prosecutions prosecutor prosecutor's prosecutors prospect prospect's prospected prospecting prospective prospector prospector's prospectors prospects prospectus prospectus's prospectuses prosper prospered prospering prosperity prosperity's prosperous prospers prostitute prostitute's prostituted prostitutes prostituting prostitution prostitution's prostrate prostrated prostrates prostrating protagonist protagonist's protagonists protect protected protecting protection protection's protections protective protector protector's protectors protects protege protege's proteges protein protein's proteins protest protest's protestant protested protesting protests protocol protocol's protocols proton proton's protons prototype prototype's prototypes protract protracted protracting protractor protractor's protractors protracts protrude protruded protrudes protruding protrusion protrusion's protrusions proud prouder proudest proudly provable provably prove proved proven provenance proverb proverb's proverbial proverbs proves provide provided providence providence's provider provides providing province province's provinces provincial provincial's provincials proving provision provision's provisional provisionally provisioned provisioning provisions proviso proviso's provisos provocation provocation's provocations provocative provoke provoked provokes provoking prow prow's prowess prowess's prowl prowl's prowled prowler prowler's prowlers prowling prowls prows proxies proximity proximity's proxy proxy's prude prude's prudence prudence's prudent prudes prudish prune prune's pruned prunes pruning pry pry's prying psalm psalm's psalms pseudo pseudonym pseudonym's pseudonyms psych psyche psyche's psyched psychedelic psychedelic's psychedelics psyches psychiatric psychiatrist psychiatrist's psychiatrists psychiatry psychiatry's psychic psychic's psychics psyching psychoanalysis psychoanalysis's psychoanalyst psychoanalyst's psychoanalysts psychological psychologically psychologies psychologist psychologist's psychologists psychology psychology's psychopath psychopath's psychopaths psychoses psychosis psychosis's psychotherapies psychotherapy psychotherapy's psychotic psychs pub puberty puberty's public public's publication publication's publications publicity publicity's publicize publicized publicizes publicizing publicly publish published publisher publisher's publishers publishes publishing puck puck's pucker pucker's puckered puckering puckers pucks pudding pudding's puddings puddle puddle's puddled puddles puddling pudgier pudgiest pudgy pueblo pueblo's pueblos puff puff's puffed puffer puffier puffiest puffing puffs puffy pugnacious puke puke's puked pukes puking pull pull's pulled pulley pulley's pulleys pulling pullover pullover's pullovers pulls pulmonary pulp pulp's pulped pulping pulpit pulpit's pulpits pulps pulsate pulsated pulsates pulsating pulsation pulsation's pulsations pulse pulse's pulsed pulses pulsing pulverize pulverized pulverizes pulverizing puma puma's pumas pumice pumice's pumices pummel pummeled pummeling pummels pump pump's pumped pumpernickel pumpernickel's pumping pumpkin pumpkin's pumpkins pumps pun pun's punch punch's punched punches punching punchline punctual punctuality punctuality's punctuate punctuated punctuates punctuating punctuation punctuation's puncture puncture's punctured punctures puncturing pundit pundit's pundits pungent punier puniest punish punishable punished punishes punishing punishment punishment's punishments punitive punk punk's punker punkest punks punned punning puns punt punt's punted punter punter's punters punting punts puny pup pup's pupil pupil's pupils pupped puppet puppet's puppets puppies pupping puppy puppy's pups purchase purchase's purchased purchaser purchaser's purchasers purchases purchasing pure puree puree's pureed pureeing purees purely purer purest purgatory purge purge's purged purges purging purification purification's purified purifies purify purifying puritanical purity purity's purple purple's purpler purples purplest purport purport's purported purporting purports purpose purpose's purposed purposeful purposes purposing purr purr's purred purring purrs purse purse's pursed purses pursing pursue pursued pursues pursuing pursuit pursuit's pursuits purveyor pus pus's push push's pushed pusher pusher's pushers pushes pushier pushiest pushing pushover pushover's pushovers pushy puss puss's pusses pussier pussies pussiest pussy pussy's put put's putative putrid puts putt putt's putted putter putter's puttered puttering putters puttied putties putting putts putty putty's puttying puzzle puzzle's puzzled puzzles puzzling pyramid pyramid's pyramided pyramiding pyramids pyre pyre's pyres python python's pythons qua quack quack's quacked quacking quacks quadrangle quadrangle's quadrangles quadrant quadrant's quadrants quadratic quadrilateral quadrilateral's quadrilaterals quadruped quadruped's quadrupeds quadruple quadruple's quadrupled quadruples quadruplet quadruplet's quadruplets quadrupling quagmire quagmire's quagmires quail quail's quailed quailing quails quaint quainter quaintest quake quake's quaked quakes quaking qualification qualification's qualifications qualified qualifier qualifier's qualifiers qualifies qualify qualifying qualitative qualities quality quality's qualm qualm's qualms quandaries quandary quandary's quantifier quantify quantitative quantities quantity quantity's quantum quarantine quarantine's quarantined quarantines quarantining quark quarrel quarrel's quarreled quarreling quarrels quarrelsome quarried quarries quarry quarry's quarrying quart quart's quarter quarter's quarterback quarterback's quarterbacked quarterbacking quarterbacks quartered quartering quarterlies quarterly quarterly's quarters quartet quartet's quartets quarts quartz quartz's quash quashed quashes quashing quaver quaver's quavered quavering quavers quay quay's quays queasier queasiest queasy queen queen's queened queening queenlier queenliest queenly queens queer queer's queered queerer queerest queering queers quell quelled quelling quells quench quenched quenches quenching queried queries query query's querying quest quest's quested questing question question's questionable questioned questioning questionnaire questionnaire's questionnaires questions quests queue queue's queued queues queuing quibble quibble's quibbled quibbles quibbling quiche quick quick's quicken quickened quickening quickens quicker quickest quickly quicksand quicksand's quicksands quiet quiet's quieted quieter quietest quieting quietly quiets quill quill's quills quilt quilt's quilted quilting quilts quinine quinine's quintessence quintessence's quintessences quintet quintet's quintets quintuplet quintuplet's quintuplets quip quip's quipped quipping quips quirk quirk's quirked quirking quirks quirky quit quite quits quitter quitter's quitters quitting quiver quiver's quivered quivering quivers quiz quiz's quizzed quizzes quizzical quizzing quorum quorum's quorums quota quota's quotas quotation quotation's quotations quote quote's quoted quotes quotient quotient's quotients quoting rabbi rabbi's rabbis rabbit rabbit's rabbited rabbiting rabbits rabble rabble's rabbles rabid rabies rabies's raccoon raccoon's race race's raced racer races racetrack racetrack's racetracks racial racially racier raciest racing racism racism's racist racist's racists rack rack's racked racket racket's racketed racketeer racketeer's racketeered racketeering racketeers racketing rackets racking racks racy radar radar's radars radial radial's radials radiance radiance's radiant radiate radiated radiates radiating radiation radiation's radiations radiator radiator's radiators radical radical's radically radicals radii radio radio's radioactive radioactivity radioactivity's radioed radioing radios radish radish's radishes radium radium's radius radius's raffle raffle's raffled raffles raffling raft raft's rafted rafter rafter's rafters rafting rafts rag rag's ragamuffin ragamuffin's ragamuffins rage rage's raged rages ragged raggeder raggedest ragging raging rags ragtime ragtime's raid raid's raided raider raider's raiders raiding raids rail rail's railed railing railing's railings railroad railroad's railroaded railroading railroads rails railway railway's railways rain rain's rainbow rainbow's rainbows raincoat raincoat's raincoats raindrop raindrop's raindrops rained rainfall rainfall's rainfalls rainier rainiest raining rains rainstorm rainstorm's rainstorms rainwater rainwater's rainy raise raise's raised raises raisin raisin's raising raisins rake rake's raked rakes raking rallied rallies rally rally's rallying ram ram's ramble ramble's rambled rambler rambler's ramblers rambles rambling ramification ramification's ramifications rammed ramming ramp ramp's rampage rampage's rampaged rampages rampaging rampant ramps ramrod ramrod's ramrodded ramrodding ramrods rams ramshackle ran ranch ranch's ranched rancher rancher's ranchers ranches ranching rancid rancor rancor's rancorous random randomly randomness rang range range's ranged ranger ranger's rangers ranges ranging rank rank's ranked ranker rankest ranking rankle rankled rankles rankling ranks ransack ransacked ransacking ransacks ransom ransom's ransomed ransoming ransoms rant rant's ranted ranting rants rap rap's rape rape's raped rapes rapid rapid's rapider rapidest rapidity rapidity's rapidly rapids raping rapist rapist's rapists rapped rapping rapport rapport's rapports raps rapt rapture rapture's raptures rapturous rare rared rarely rarer rares rarest raring rarities rarity rarity's rascal rascal's rascals rash rash's rasher rashes rashest rashly rasp rasp's raspberries raspberry raspberry's rasped rasping rasps raster rat rat's rate rate's rated rates rather ratification ratification's ratified ratifies ratify ratifying rating rating's ratings ratio ratio's ration ration's rational rational's rationale rationale's rationales rationality rationalization rationalize rationalized rationalizes rationalizing rationally rationals rationed rationing rations ratios rats ratted ratting rattle rattle's rattled rattler rattler's rattlers rattles rattlesnake rattlesnake's rattlesnakes rattling ratty raucous raucously ravage ravage's ravaged ravages ravaging rave rave's raved ravel ravel's raveled raveling ravels raven raven's ravened ravening ravenous ravenously ravens raves ravine ravine's ravines raving raving's ravings ravish ravished ravishes ravishing raw raw's rawer rawest ray ray's rayon rayon's rays raze razed razes razing razor razor's razors re's reach reach's reached reaches reaching react reacted reacting reaction reaction's reactionaries reactionary reactionary's reactions reactive reactor reactor's reactors reacts read read's readability readable reader reader's readers readership readied readier readies readiest readily readiness readiness's reading reading's readings readjust readjusted readjusting readjusts reads ready readying real real's realer realest realism realism's realist realist's realistic realistically realists realities reality reality's realization realization's realize realized realizes realizing reallocate reallocated reallocates reallocating really realm realm's realms reals realty realty's ream ream's reamed reaming reams reap reaped reaper reaper's reapers reaping reappear reappeared reappearing reappears reaps rear rear's reared rearing rearrange rearranged rearrangement rearrangement's rearrangements rearranges rearranging rears reason reason's reasonable reasonably reasoned reasoning reasons reassurance reassurance's reassurances reassure reassured reassures reassuring rebate rebate's rebated rebates rebating rebel rebel's rebelled rebelling rebellion rebellion's rebellions rebellious rebels rebind rebinding rebinds rebirth rebirth's rebirths reborn rebound rebound's rebounded rebounding rebounds rebuff rebuff's rebuffed rebuffing rebuffs rebuild rebuilding rebuilds rebuilt rebuke rebuke's rebuked rebukes rebuking rebut rebuts rebuttal rebuttal's rebuttals rebutted rebutting recalcitrant recall recall's recalled recalling recalls recant recanted recanting recants recap recap's recapped recapping recaps recapture recapture's recaptured recaptures recapturing recede receded recedes receding receipt receipt's receipted receipting receipts receive received receiver receiver's receivers receives receiving recent recenter recentest recently receptacle receptacle's receptacles reception reception's receptionist receptionist's receptionists receptions receptive recess recess's recessed recesses recessing recession recession's recessions recharge rechargeable recharged recharges recharging recipe recipe's recipes recipient recipient's recipients reciprocal reciprocal's reciprocals reciprocate reciprocated reciprocates reciprocating recital recital's recitals recitation recitation's recitations recite recited recites reciting reckless recklessly recklessness recklessness's reckon reckoned reckoning reckons reclaim reclaimed reclaiming reclaims reclamation reclamation's recline reclined reclines reclining recluse recluse's recluses recognition recognition's recognizable recognize recognized recognizes recognizing recoil recoil's recoiled recoiling recoils recollect recollected recollecting recollection recollection's recollections recollects recommend recommendation recommendation's recommendations recommended recommending recommends recompense recompense's recompensed recompenses recompensing recompile recompiled recompiling reconcile reconciled reconciles reconciliation reconciliation's reconciliations reconciling recondition reconditioned reconditioning reconditions reconfigure reconfigured reconnaissance reconnaissance's reconnaissances reconnect reconnected reconnecting reconnects reconsider reconsidered reconsidering reconsiders reconstruct reconstructed reconstructing reconstruction reconstruction's reconstructions reconstructs record record's recorded recorder recorder's recorders recording recording's recordings records recount recount's recounted recounting recounts recoup recouped recouping recoups recourse recourse's recover recoverable recovered recoveries recovering recovers recovery recovery's recreate recreated recreates recreating recreation recreation's recreational recreations recruit recruit's recruited recruiting recruitment recruits rectal rectangle rectangle's rectangles rectangular rectified rectifies rectify rectifying rector rector's rectors rectum rectum's rectums recuperate recuperated recuperates recuperating recuperation recuperation's recur recurred recurrence recurrence's recurrences recurrent recurring recurs recursion recursive recursively recycle recycle's recycled recycles recycling red red's redden reddened reddening reddens redder reddest redeem redeemable redeemed redeeming redeems redefine redefined redefines redefining redefinition redemption redemption's redesign redesigned redesigning redesigns redhead redhead's redheads redid redirect redirected redirecting redirection redirects rediscover rediscovered rediscovering rediscovers redistribute redistributed redistributes redistributing redistribution redo redoes redoing redone redraft redraw redress redress's redressed redresses redressing reds reduce reduced reduces reducing reduction reduction's reductions redundancies redundancy redundancy's redundant reed reed's reeds reef reef's reefed reefing reefs reek reek's reeked reeking reeks reel reel's reelect reelected reelecting reelects reeled reeling reels refer referee referee's refereed refereeing referees reference reference's referenced references referencing referendum referendum's referendums referred referring refers refill refill's refilled refilling refills refine refined refinement refinement's refinements refineries refinery refinery's refines refining reflect reflected reflecting reflection reflection's reflections reflective reflector reflector's reflectors reflects reflex reflex's reflexes reflexive reflexive's reflexives reform reform's reformat reformation reformation's reformations reformatted reformatting reformed reformer reformer's reformers reforming reforms refraction refrain refrain's refrained refraining refrains refresh refreshed refreshes refreshing refreshment refreshment's refreshments refrigerate refrigerated refrigerates refrigerating refrigeration refrigeration's refrigerator refrigerator's refrigerators refuel refueled refueling refuels refuge refuge's refugee refugee's refugees refuges refund refund's refunded refunding refunds refurbish refurbished refurbishes refurbishing refurbishment refusal refusal's refusals refuse refuse's refused refuses refusing refutation refute refuted refutes refuting regain regained regaining regains regal regale regaled regales regalia regalia's regaling regard regard's regarded regarding regardless regards regatta regatta's regattas regenerate regenerated regenerates regenerating regeneration regeneration's regent regent's regents regime regime's regimen regimen's regimens regiment regiment's regimental regimented regimenting regiments regimes region region's regional regions register register's registered registering registers registrar registrar's registrars registration registration's registrations registries registry registry's regress regress's regressed regresses regressing regression regression's regressions regret regret's regretful regrets regrettable regrettably regretted regretting regular regular's regularity regularity's regularly regulars regulate regulated regulates regulating regulation regulation's regulations regurgitate regurgitated regurgitates regurgitating rehabilitate rehabilitated rehabilitates rehabilitating rehabilitation rehabilitation's rehash rehash's rehashed rehashes rehashing rehearsal rehearsal's rehearsals rehearse rehearsed rehearses rehearsing reign reign's reigned reigning reigns reimburse reimbursed reimbursement reimbursement's reimbursements reimburses reimbursing rein rein's reincarnate reincarnated reincarnates reincarnating reincarnation reincarnation's reincarnations reindeer reindeer's reined reinforce reinforced reinforcement reinforcement's reinforcements reinforces reinforcing reining reins reinstate reinstated reinstatement reinstatement's reinstates reinstating reiterate reiterated reiterates reiterating reiteration reiteration's reiterations reject reject's rejected rejecting rejection rejection's rejections rejects rejoice rejoiced rejoices rejoicing rejoin rejoinder rejoinder's rejoinders rejoined rejoining rejoins rejuvenate rejuvenated rejuvenates rejuvenating rejuvenation rejuvenation's relaid relapse relapse's relapsed relapses relapsing relate related relates relating relation relation's relational relations relationship relationship's relationships relative relative's relatively relatives relativistic relativity relax relaxation relaxation's relaxations relaxed relaxes relaxing relay relay's relayed relaying relays releasable release release's released releases releasing relegate relegated relegates relegating relent relented relenting relentless relentlessly relents relevance relevance's relevant reliability reliability's reliable reliably reliance reliance's reliant relic relic's relics relied relief relief's reliefs relies relieve relieved relieves relieving religion religion's religions religious religious's religiously relinquish relinquished relinquishes relinquishing relish relish's relished relishes relishing relive relived relives reliving reload reloaded reloading reloads relocatable relocate relocated relocates relocating relocation reluctance reluctance's reluctant reluctantly rely relying remade remain remainder remainder's remainders remained remaining remains remake remakes remaking remark remark's remarkable remarkably remarked remarking remarks remedial remedied remedies remedy remedy's remedying remember remembered remembering remembers remembrance remembrance's remembrances remind reminded reminder reminder's reminders reminding reminds reminisce reminisced reminiscence reminiscence's reminiscences reminiscent reminisces reminiscing remiss remission remission's remissions remit remits remittance remittance's remittances remitted remitting remnant remnant's remnants remodel remodeled remodeling remodels remorse remorse's remorseful remorseless remote remote's remotely remoter remotes remotest removable removal removal's removals remove remove's removed removes removing remunerate remunerated remunerates remunerating remuneration remuneration's remunerations renaissance rename renamed renames renaming rend render render's rendered rendering renders rendezvous rendezvous's rendezvoused rendezvouses rendezvousing rending rendition rendition's renditions rends renegade renegade's renegaded renegades renegading renege reneged reneges reneging renew renewable renewal renewal's renewals renewed renewing renews renounce renounced renounces renouncing renovate renovated renovates renovating renovation renovation's renovations renown renown's renowned rent rent's rental rental's rentals rented renting rents renunciation renunciation's renunciations reopen reopened reopening reopens reorganization reorganize reorganized reorganizes reorganizing repaid repair repair's repaired repairing repairs reparation reparation's repatriate repatriate's repatriated repatriates repatriating repay repaying repayment repayment's repayments repays repeal repeal's repealed repealing repeals repeat repeat's repeatable repeated repeatedly repeating repeats repel repelled repellent repellent's repellents repelling repels repent repentance repentance's repentant repented repenting repents repercussion repercussion's repercussions repertoire repertoire's repertoires repetition repetition's repetitions repetitious repetitive rephrase replace replaced replacement replacement's replacements replaces replacing replay replenish replenished replenishes replenishing replete repleted repletes repleting replica replica's replicas replicate replicated replicates replicating replication replied replies reply reply's replying report report's reported reportedly reporter reporter's reporters reporting reports repose repose's reposed reposes reposing repositories repository repository's reprehensible represent representation representation's representations representative representative's representatives represented representing represents repress repressed represses repressing repression repression's repressions repressive reprieve reprieve's reprieved reprieves reprieving reprimand reprimand's reprimanded reprimanding reprimands reprint reprinted reprinting reprints reprisal reprisal's reprisals reproach reproach's reproached reproaches reproaching reproduce reproduced reproduces reproducing reproduction reproduction's reproductions reproductive reprogram reprogrammed reprogramming reprograms reprove reproved reproves reproving reptile reptile's reptiles republic republic's republican republican's republicans republics repudiate repudiated repudiates repudiating repudiation repudiation's repudiations repugnance repugnance's repugnant repulse repulse's repulsed repulses repulsing repulsion repulsion's repulsive reputable reputation reputation's reputations repute repute's reputed reputedly reputes reputing request request's requested requesting requests requiem require required requirement requirement's requirements requires requiring requisite requisite's requisites requisition requisition's requisitioned requisitioning requisitions reread rereading rereads reroute rerouted reroutes rerouting resale reschedule rescheduled reschedules rescheduling rescind rescinded rescinding rescinds rescue rescue's rescued rescuer rescuer's rescuers rescues rescuing research research's researched researcher researcher's researchers researches researching resemblance resemblance's resemblances resemble resembled resembles resembling resent resented resentful resenting resentment resentment's resentments resents reservation reservation's reservations reserve reserve's reserved reserves reserving reservoir reservoir's reservoirs reset reset's resets resetting reshuffle reside resided residence residence's residences resident resident's residential residents resides residing residual residual's residuals residue residue's residues resign resignation resignation's resignations resigned resigning resigns resilience resilience's resilient resin resin's resins resist resist's resistance resistance's resistances resistant resisted resisting resistor resistor's resistors resists resolute resolutely resolution resolution's resolutions resolve resolve's resolved resolver resolves resolving resonance resonance's resonances resonant resort resort's resorted resorting resorts resound resounded resounding resounds resource resource's resourceful resourcefulness resourcefulness's resources respect respect's respectability respectability's respectable respectably respected respectful respectfully respecting respective respectively respects respiration respiration's respirator respirator's respirators respiratory respite respite's respites resplendent respond responded responding responds response response's responses responsibilities responsibility responsibility's responsible responsibly responsive rest rest's restart restart's restarted restarting restarts restaurant restaurant's restaurants rested restful restfuller restfullest resting restitution restitution's restive restless restlessly restlessness restlessness's restoration restoration's restorations restore restored restores restoring restrain restrained restraining restrains restraint restraint's restraints restrict restricted restricting restriction restriction's restrictions restrictive restricts restructure restructured restructures restructuring rests resubmit resubmits resubmitted resubmitting result result's resultant resultant's resultants resulted resulting results resume resume's resumed resumes resuming resumption resumption's resumptions resurface resurfaced resurfaces resurfacing resurgence resurgence's resurgences resurrect resurrected resurrecting resurrection resurrection's resurrections resurrects resuscitate resuscitated resuscitates resuscitating resuscitation resuscitation's retail retail's retailed retailer retailer's retailers retailing retails retain retained retainer retainer's retainers retaining retains retaliate retaliated retaliates retaliating retaliation retaliation's retaliations retard retard's retarded retarding retards retch retched retches retching retention retention's rethink reticence reticence's reticent retina retina's retinas retire retired retirement retirement's retirements retires retiring retort retort's retorted retorting retorts retrace retraced retraces retracing retract retracted retracting retraction retraction's retractions retracts retreat retreat's retreated retreating retreats retribution retribution's retributions retries retrieval retrieval's retrievals retrieve retrieve's retrieved retriever retriever's retrievers retrieves retrieving retroactive retrograde retrospect retrospect's retrospected retrospecting retrospective retrospective's retrospectively retrospectives retrospects retry return return's returnable returnable's returnables returned returning returns retype reunion reunion's reunions reunite reunited reunites reuniting reuse reused reuses reusing rev rev's revamp revamp's revamped revamping revamps reveal revealed revealing reveals revel revel's revelation revelation's revelations reveled reveler reveler's revelers reveling revelries revelry revelry's revels revenge revenge's revenged revengeful revenges revenging revenue revenue's revenues reverberate reverberated reverberates reverberating reverberation reverberation's reverberations revere revered reverence reverence's reverenced reverences reverencing reverent reverently reveres reverie reverie's reveries revering reversal reversal's reversals reverse reverse's reversed reverses reversible reversing reversion reversion's revert reverted reverting reverts review review's reviewed reviewer reviewer's reviewers reviewing reviews revile reviled reviles reviling revise revise's revised revises revising revision revision's revisions revisit revisited revisiting revisits revival revival's revivals revive revived revives reviving revoke revoked revokes revoking revolt revolt's revolted revolting revolts revolution revolution's revolutionaries revolutionary revolutionary's revolutionize revolutionized revolutionizes revolutionizing revolutions revolve revolved revolver revolver's revolvers revolves revolving revs revue revue's revues revulsion revulsion's revved revving reward reward's rewarded rewarding rewards rewind rework rewrite rewrite's rewrites rewriting rewritten rewrote rhapsodies rhapsody rhapsody's rhetoric rhetoric's rhetorical rheumatism rheumatism's rhino rhino's rhinoceros rhinoceros's rhinoceroses rhinos rhododendron rhododendron's rhododendrons rhubarb rhubarb's rhubarbs rhyme rhyme's rhymed rhymes rhyming rhythm rhythm's rhythmic rhythms rib rib's ribbed ribbing ribbon ribbon's ribbons ribs rice rice's riced rices rich rich's richer riches richest richly richness richness's ricing ricketier ricketiest rickety rickshaw rickshaw's rickshaws ricochet ricochet's ricocheted ricocheting ricochets rid riddance riddance's ridden ridding riddle riddle's riddled riddles riddling ride ride's rider rider's riders rides ridge ridge's ridged ridges ridging ridicule ridicule's ridiculed ridicules ridiculing ridiculous ridiculously riding rids rife rifer rifest rifle rifle's rifled rifles rifling rift rift's rifted rifting rifts rig rig's rigged rigging rigging's right right's righted righteous righteously righteousness righteousness's righter rightest rightful rightfully righting rightly rightmost rightness rightness's rights rigid rigidity rigidity's rigidly rigor rigor's rigorous rigorously rigors rigs rile riled riles riling rim rim's rimmed rimming rims rind rind's rinds ring ring's ringed ringing ringleader ringleader's ringleaders ringlet ringlet's ringlets rings ringworm ringworm's rink rink's rinks rinse rinse's rinsed rinses rinsing riot riot's rioted rioter rioter's rioters rioting riotous riots rip rip's ripe ripen ripened ripeness ripeness's ripening ripens riper ripest riposte ripped ripping ripple ripple's rippled ripples rippling rips rise rise's risen riser riser's risers rises rising risk risk's risked riskier riskiest risking risks risky risque rite rite's rites ritual ritual's rituals rival rival's rivaled rivaling rivalries rivalry rivalry's rivals river river's rivers rivet rivet's riveted riveting rivets roach roach's roaches road road's roadblock roadblock's roadblocked roadblocking roadblocks roads roadside roadside's roadsides roam roamed roaming roams roar roar's roared roaring roars roast roast's roasted roasting roasts rob robbed robber robber's robberies robbers robbery robbery's robbing robe robe's robed robes robin robin's robing robins robot robot's robots robs robust robuster robustest robustness rock rock's rocked rocker rocker's rockers rocket rocket's rocketed rocketing rockets rockier rockiest rocking rocks rocky rod rod's rode rodent rodent's rodents rodeo rodeo's rodeos rods roe roe's roes rogue rogue's rogues roguish role role's roles roll roll's rolled roller roller's rollers rolling rolls roman romance romance's romanced romances romancing romantic romantic's romantically romantics romp romp's romped romping romps roof roof's roofed roofing roofing's roofs rook rook's rooked rookie rookie's rookies rooking rooks room room's roomed roomier roomiest rooming roommate roommate's roommates rooms roomy roost roost's roosted rooster rooster's roosters roosting roosts root root's rooted rooter rooting roots rope rope's roped ropes roping rosaries rosary rosary's rose rose's rosemary rosemary's roses rosier rosiest roster roster's rosters rostrum rostrum's rostrums rosy rot rot's rotaries rotary rotary's rotate rotated rotates rotating rotation rotation's rotations rote rote's rotisserie rotisserie's rotisseries rotor rotor's rotors rots rotted rotten rottener rottenest rotting rotund rotunda rotunda's rotundas rouge rouge's rouged rouges rough rough's roughage roughage's roughed roughen roughened roughening roughens rougher roughest roughhouse roughhouse's roughhoused roughhouses roughhousing roughing roughly roughness roughness's roughs rouging roulette roulette's round round's roundabout roundabout's roundabouts rounded rounder roundest rounding roundness roundness's rounds rouse roused rouses rousing rout rout's route route's routed routeing router routes routine routine's routinely routines routing routs row row's rowboat rowboat's rowboats rowdier rowdies rowdiest rowdiness rowdiness's rowdy rowdy's rowed rowing rows royal royal's royally royals royalties royalty royalty's rpm rub rub's rubbed rubber rubber's rubbers rubbing rubbish rubbish's rubbished rubbishes rubbishing rubble rubble's rubier rubies rubiest rubric rubs ruby ruby's rucksack ruckus ruckus's ruckuses rudder rudder's rudders ruddier ruddiest ruddy rude rudely rudeness rudeness's ruder rudest rudimentary rue rue's rued rueful rues ruff ruff's ruffed ruffian ruffian's ruffians ruffing ruffle ruffle's ruffled ruffles ruffling ruffs rug rug's rugby rugged ruggeder ruggedest rugs ruin ruin's ruined ruing ruining ruinous ruins rule rule's ruled ruler ruler's rulers rules ruling ruling's rulings rum rum's rumble rumble's rumbled rumbles rumbling ruminate ruminated ruminates ruminating rummage rummage's rummaged rummages rummaging rummer rummest rummy rummy's rumor rumor's rumored rumoring rumors rump rump's rumple rumple's rumpled rumples rumpling rumps rums run run's runaway runaway's runaways rundown rundown's rundowns rune rune's runes rung rung's rungs runner runner's runners runnier runniest running running's runny runs runt runt's runts runway runway's runways rupture rupture's ruptured ruptures rupturing rural ruse ruse's ruses rush rush's rushed rushes rushing rust rust's rusted rustic rustic's rustics rustier rustiest rusting rustle rustle's rustled rustler rustler's rustlers rustles rustling rusts rusty rut rut's ruthless ruthlessly ruthlessness ruthlessness's ruts rutted rutting rye rye's sabbatical saber saber's sabers sabotage sabotage's sabotaged sabotages sabotaging saboteur saboteur's saboteurs sac sac's sack sack's sacked sacking sacks sacrament sacrament's sacraments sacred sacrifice sacrifice's sacrificed sacrifices sacrificial sacrificing sacrilege sacrilege's sacrileges sacrilegious sacs sad sadden saddened saddening saddens sadder saddest saddle saddle's saddled saddles saddling sades sadism sadism's sadist sadist's sadistic sadists sadly sadness sadness's safari safari's safaried safariing safaris safe safe's safeguard safeguard's safeguarded safeguarding safeguards safekeeping safekeeping's safely safer safes safest safeties safety safety's saffron saffron's saffrons sag sag's saga saga's sagas sage sage's sagebrush sagebrush's sager sages sagest sagged sagging sags said sail sail's sailboat sailboat's sailboats sailed sailing sailor sailor's sailors sails saint saint's saintlier saintliest saintly saints sake sake's salable salad salad's salads salami salami's salamis salaries salary salary's sale sale's sales salesman salesman's salesmen salespeople salesperson salesperson's salespersons saleswoman saleswoman's saleswomen salient salient's salients saliva saliva's salivate salivated salivates salivating sallow sallower sallowest sally salmon salmon's salmons salon salon's salons saloon saloon's saloons salt salt's salted salter saltest saltier saltiest salting salts salty salutation salutation's salutations salute salute's saluted salutes saluting salvage salvage's salvaged salvages salvaging salvation salvation's salve salve's salved salves salving same sameness sameness's sames sample sample's sampled sampler samples sampling sanatorium sanatorium's sanatoriums sanctified sanctifies sanctify sanctifying sanctimonious sanction sanction's sanctioned sanctioning sanctions sanctity sanctity's sanctuaries sanctuary sanctuary's sand sand's sandal sandal's sandals sandbag sandbag's sandbagged sandbagging sandbags sanded sandier sandiest sanding sandman sandman's sandmen sandpaper sandpaper's sandpapered sandpapering sandpapers sands sandstone sandstone's sandstorm sandstorm's sandstorms sandwich sandwich's sandwiched sandwiches sandwiching sandy sane saner sanest sang sangs sanitarium sanitarium's sanitariums sanitary sanitation sanitation's sanity sanity's sank sanserif sap sap's sapling sapling's saplings sapped sapphire sapphire's sapphires sapping saps sarcasm sarcasm's sarcasms sarcastic sarcastically sardine sardine's sardines sari sari's saris sash sash's sashes sassier sassiest sassy sat satanic satchel satchel's satchels satellite satellite's satellited satellites satelliting satin satin's satire satire's satires satirical satirist satirist's satirists satirize satirized satirizes satirizing satisfaction satisfaction's satisfactions satisfactorily satisfactory satisfied satisfies satisfy satisfying saturate saturated saturates saturating saturation saturation's sauce sauce's sauced saucepan saucepan's saucepans saucer saucer's saucers sauces saucier sauciest saucing saucy sauerkraut sauerkraut's sauna sauna's saunaed saunaing saunas saunter saunter's sauntered sauntering saunters sausage sausage's sausages saute saute's sauteed sauteing sautes savage savage's savaged savagely savager savageries savagery savagery's savages savagest savaging save save's saved saver saves saving saving's savings savior savior's saviors savor savor's savored savorier savories savoriest savoring savors savory savory's savvied savvier savvies savviest savvy savvy's savvying saw saw's sawdust sawdust's sawed sawing saws saxophone saxophone's saxophones say say's saying saying's sayings says scab scab's scabbed scabbing scabs scaffold scaffold's scaffolding scaffolding's scaffolds scalar scalars scald scald's scalded scalding scalds scale scale's scaled scales scalier scaliest scaling scallop scallop's scalloped scalloping scallops scalp scalp's scalped scalpel scalpel's scalpels scalping scalps scaly scamper scamper's scampered scampering scampers scan scan's scandal scandal's scandalize scandalized scandalizes scandalizing scandalous scandals scanned scanner scanner's scanners scanning scans scant scanted scanter scantest scantier scanties scantiest scanting scants scanty scapegoat scapegoat's scapegoated scapegoating scapegoats scar scar's scarce scarcely scarcer scarcest scarcity scarcity's scare scare's scarecrow scarecrow's scarecrows scared scares scarf scarf's scarfed scarfing scarfs scarier scariest scaring scarlet scarlet's scarred scarring scars scarves scary scathing scatter scatter's scatterbrain scatterbrain's scatterbrained scatterbrains scattered scattering scatters scavenger scavenger's scavengers scenario scenario's scenarios scene scene's scenery scenery's scenes scenic scent scent's scented scenting scents scepter scepter's scepters schedule schedule's scheduled scheduler schedules scheduling scheme scheme's schemed schemer schemer's schemers schemes scheming schizophrenia schizophrenic scholar scholar's scholarly scholars scholarship scholarship's scholarships scholastic school school's schoolboy schoolboy's schoolboys schoolchild schoolchild's schoolchildren schooled schooling schools schoolteacher schoolteacher's schoolteachers schooner schooner's schooners science science's sciences scientific scientifically scientist scientist's scientists scissor scissors scoff scoff's scoffed scoffing scoffs scold scold's scolded scolding scolds scoop scoop's scooped scooping scoops scoot scooted scooter scooter's scooters scooting scoots scope scope's scoped scopes scoping scorch scorch's scorched scorches scorching score score's scored scorer scores scoring scorn scorn's scorned scornful scorning scorns scorpion scorpion's scorpions scotch scotch's scotches scotchs scoundrel scoundrel's scoundrels scour scoured scourge scourge's scourged scourges scourging scouring scours scout scout's scouted scouting scouts scowl scowl's scowled scowling scowls scrabble scram scramble scramble's scrambled scrambles scrambling scrammed scramming scrams scrap scrap's scrapbook scrapbook's scrapbooks scrape scrape's scraped scrapes scraping scrapped scrapping scraps scratch scratch's scratched scratches scratchier scratchiest scratching scratchy scrawl scrawl's scrawled scrawling scrawls scrawnier scrawniest scrawny scream scream's screamed screaming screams screech screech's screeched screeches screeching screen screen's screened screening screens screw screw's screwdriver screwdriver's screwdrivers screwed screwier screwiest screwing screws screwy scribble scribble's scribbled scribbles scribbling scribe scribe's scribes script script's scripted scripting scripts scripture scripture's scriptures scriptwriter scriptwriter's scriptwriters scroll scroll's scrolled scrolling scrolls scrounge scrounged scrounges scrounging scrub scrub's scrubbed scrubbing scrubs scruff scruff's scruffier scruffiest scruffs scruffy scruple scruple's scrupled scruples scrupling scrupulous scrupulously scrutinize scrutinized scrutinizes scrutinizing scrutiny scrutiny's scuff scuff's scuffed scuffing scuffle scuffle's scuffled scuffles scuffling scuffs sculptor sculptor's sculptors sculpture sculpture's sculptured sculptures sculpturing scum scum's scummed scumming scums scurried scurries scurrilous scurry scurry's scurrying scuttle scuttle's scuttled scuttles scuttling scythe scythe's scythed scythes scything sea sea's seafaring seafaring's seafood seafood's seal seal's sealed sealing seals seam seam's seaman seaman's seamed seamen seaming seams seamstress seamstress's seamstresses seaport seaport's seaports sear sear's search search's searched searches searching searchlight searchlight's searchlights seared searing sears seas seashell seashell's seashells seashore seashore's seashores seasick seasickness seasickness's seaside seaside's seasides season season's seasonable seasonal seasoned seasoning seasoning's seasonings seasons seat seat's seated seating seats seaweed seaweed's sec secede seceded secedes seceding secession secession's seclude secluded secludes secluding seclusion seclusion's second second's secondaries secondarily secondary secondary's seconded seconding secondly seconds secrecy secrecy's secret secret's secretarial secretaries secretary secretary's secrete secreted secretes secreting secretion secretion's secretions secretive secretly secrets sect sect's section section's sectioned sectioning sections sector sector's sectors sects secular secure secured securely securer secures securest securing securities security security's sedan sedan's sedans sedate sedated sedater sedates sedatest sedating sedative sedative's sedatives sedentary sediment sediment's sedimentary sediments seduce seduced seduces seducing seduction seduction's seductions seductive see see's seed seed's seeded seedier seediest seeding seedling seedling's seedlings seeds seedy seeing seek seeking seeks seem seemed seeming seemingly seems seen seep seepage seepage's seeped seeping seeps seer sees seesaw seesaw's seesawed seesawing seesaws seethe seethed seethes seething segment segment's segmentation segmented segmenting segments segregate segregated segregates segregating segregation segregation's seize seized seizes seizing seizure seizure's seizures seldom select selected selecting selection selection's selections selective selectively selector selector's selectors selects self self's selfish selfishness selfishness's sell sell's seller seller's sellers selling sells selves semantic semantically semantics semantics's semblance semblance's semblances semen semen's semester semester's semesters semicircle semicircle's semicircles semicolon semicolon's semicolons semiconductor semiconductor's semiconductors semifinal semifinal's semifinals seminar seminar's seminaries seminars seminary seminary's senate senate's senates senator senator's senators send sender sending sends senile senility senility's senior senior's seniority seniority's seniors sensation sensation's sensational sensationalism sensationalism's sensations sense sense's sensed senseless senses sensibilities sensibility sensibility's sensible sensibly sensing sensitive sensitive's sensitives sensitivities sensitivity sensitivity's sensor sensor's sensors sensory sensual sensuality sensuality's sensuous sent sentence sentence's sentenced sentences sentencing sentience sentient sentiment sentiment's sentimental sentimentality sentimentality's sentiments sentries sentry sentry's separate separate's separated separately separates separating separation separation's separations separator separator's separators sepulcher sepulcher's sepulchered sepulchering sepulchers sequel sequel's sequels sequence sequence's sequenced sequencer sequences sequencing sequential sequentially sequin sequin's sequins serenade serenade's serenaded serenades serenading serene serener serenest serenity serenity's sergeant sergeant's sergeants serial serial's serials series series's serious seriously seriousness sermon sermon's sermons serpent serpent's serpents serum serum's serums servant servant's servants serve serve's served server server's servers serves service service's serviceable serviced serviceman serviceman's servicemen services servicing serviette serviette's serviettes servile serving servitude servitude's session session's sessions set set's setback setback's setbacks sets settable setter setter's setters setting setting's settings settle settle's settled settlement settlement's settlements settler settler's settlers settles settling seven seven's sevens seventeen seventeen's seventeens seventeenth seventeenth's seventeenths seventh seventh's sevenths seventies seventy seventy's sever several several's severance severance's severances severe severed severely severer severest severing severity severity's severs sew sewage sewage's sewed sewer sewer's sewers sewing sewing's sewn sews sex sex's sexed sexes sexing sexism sexist sexual sexuality sexually sexy shabbier shabbiest shabbily shabby shack shack's shackle shackle's shackled shackles shackling shacks shade shade's shaded shades shadier shadiest shading shadow shadow's shadowed shadowier shadowiest shadowing shadows shadowy shady shaft shaft's shafted shafting shafts shaggier shaggiest shaggy shake shake's shaken shakes shakier shakiest shaking shaky shall shallow shallow's shallower shallowest shallows sham sham's shamble shamble's shambles shambles's shame shame's shamed shameful shamefully shameless shames shaming shammed shamming shampoo shampoo's shampooed shampooing shampoos shamrock shamrock's shamrocks shams shanties shanty shanty's shape shape's shaped shapelier shapeliest shapely shapes shaping share share's shared shareholder shareholder's shareholders shares sharing shark shark's sharked sharking sharks sharp sharp's sharped sharpen sharpened sharpener sharpener's sharpeners sharpening sharpens sharper sharpest sharping sharply sharpness sharpness's sharps shatter shatter's shattered shattering shatters shave shave's shaved shaven shaver shaver's shavers shaves shaving shawl shawl's shawls she she's sheaf sheaf's shear shear's sheared shearing shears sheath sheath's sheathe sheathed sheathes sheathing sheaths sheave sheave's sheaves shed shed's shedding sheds sheen sheen's sheep sheep's sheepish sheepishly sheer sheer's sheered sheerer sheerest sheering sheers sheet sheet's sheets sheikh sheikh's sheikhs shelf shelf's shell shell's shelled sheller shellfish shellfish's shellfishes shelling shells shelter shelter's sheltered sheltering shelters shelve shelved shelves shelving shepherd shepherd's shepherded shepherding shepherds sherbet sherbet's sherbets sheriff sheriff's sheriffs sherries sherry sherry's shes shied shield shield's shielded shielding shields shies shift shift's shifted shiftier shiftiest shifting shiftless shifts shifty shimmer shimmer's shimmered shimmering shimmers shin shin's shine shine's shined shines shingle shingle's shingled shingles shingling shinier shiniest shining shinned shinning shins shiny ship ship's shipment shipment's shipments shipped shipping shipping's ships shipshape shipwreck shipwreck's shipwrecked shipwrecking shipwrecks shire shirk shirked shirking shirks shirt shirt's shirted shirting shirts shiver shiver's shivered shivering shivers shoal shoal's shoaled shoaling shoals shock shock's shocked shocking shocks shod shoddier shoddiest shoddy shoddy's shoe shoe's shoeing shoelace shoelace's shoelaces shoes shoestring shoestring's shoestrings shone shoo shooed shooing shook shoos shoot shoot's shooting shoots shop shop's shopkeeper shopkeeper's shopkeepers shoplifter shoplifter's shoplifters shopped shopper shopper's shoppers shopping shops shore shore's shored shores shoring short short's shortage shortage's shortages shortcoming shortcoming's shortcomings shorted shorten shortened shortening shortening's shortenings shortens shorter shortest shortfall shorthand shorthand's shorting shortlist shortly shortness shortness's shorts shot shot's shotgun shotgun's shotgunned shotgunning shotguns shots should shoulder shoulder's shouldered shouldering shoulders shout shout's shouted shouting shouts shove shove's shoved shovel shovel's shoveled shoveling shovels shoves shoving show show's showcase showcase's showcased showcases showcasing showdown showdown's showdowns showed shower shower's showered showering showers showier showiest showing showing's showings showman showman's showmen shown shows showy shrank shrapnel shrapnel's shred shred's shredded shredding shreds shrew shrew's shrewd shrewder shrewdest shrewdness shrewdness's shrews shriek shriek's shrieked shrieking shrieks shrill shrilled shriller shrillest shrilling shrills shrimp shrimp's shrimped shrimping shrimps shrine shrine's shrines shrink shrink's shrinkage shrinkage's shrinking shrinks shrivel shriveled shriveling shrivels shroud shroud's shrouded shrouding shrouds shrub shrub's shrubberies shrubbery shrubbery's shrubs shrug shrug's shrugged shrugging shrugs shrunk shrunken shuck shuck's shucked shucking shucks shudder shudder's shuddered shuddering shudders shuffle shuffle's shuffled shuffles shuffling shun shunned shunning shuns shunt shunt's shunted shunting shunts shut shutdown shuts shutter shutter's shuttered shuttering shutters shutting shuttle shuttle's shuttled shuttles shuttling shy shy's shyer shyest shying shyness shyness's sibling sibling's siblings sic sick sicked sicken sickened sickening sickens sicker sickest sicking sickle sickle's sickles sicklier sickliest sickly sickness sickness's sicknesses sicks sics side side's sided sideline sideline's sidelined sidelines sidelining sidelong sides sideshow sideshow's sideshows sidestep sidestep's sidestepped sidestepping sidesteps sidetrack sidetrack's sidetracked sidetracking sidetracks sidewalk sidewalk's sidewalks sideways siding siding's sidings sidle sidle's sidled sidles sidling siege siege's sieges sierra siesta siesta's siestas sieve sieve's sieved sieves sieving sift sifted sifting sifts sigh sigh's sighed sighing sighs sight sight's sighted sighting sightless sights sigma sign sign's signal signal's signaled signaling signals signature signature's signatures signed signer significance significance's significant significantly signified signifies signify signifying signing signpost signpost's signposted signposting signposts signs silence silence's silenced silences silencing silent silent's silenter silentest silently silents silhouette silhouette's silhouetted silhouettes silhouetting silicon silicon's silk silk's silken silks sill sill's sillier sillies silliest silliness sills silly silly's silo silo's silos silt silt's silted silting silts silver silver's silvered silvering silvers silversmith silversmith's silversmiths silverware silverware's silvery similar similarities similarity similarity's similarly simile simile's similes simmer simmer's simmered simmering simmers simple simpler simplest simplex simplicity simplicity's simplification simplified simplifies simplify simplifying simplistic simply simulate simulated simulates simulating simulation simulation's simulations simulator simultaneous simultaneously sin sin's since sincere sincerely sincerer sincerest sincerity sincerity's sine sinew sinew's sinews sinewy sinful sing sing's singe singe's singed singeing singer singer's singers singes singing single single's singled singles singles's singling singly sings singular singular's singularity singularly singulars sinister sink sink's sinking sinks sinned sinner sinner's sinners sinning sins sinus sinus's sinuses sip sip's siphon siphon's siphoned siphoning siphons sipped sipping sips sir sir's sire sire's sired siren siren's sirens sires siring sirloin sirloin's sirloins sirs sissier sissies sissiest sissy sissy's sister sister's sisterhood sisterhood's sisterhoods sisterly sisters sit site site's sited sites siting sits sitter sitter's sitters sitting situate situated situates situating situation situation's situations six six's sixes sixpence sixpence's sixpences sixteen sixteen's sixteens sixteenth sixteenth's sixteenths sixth sixth's sixths sixties sixtieth sixtieth's sixtieths sixty sixty's sizable size size's sized sizer sizes sizing sizzle sizzle's sizzled sizzles sizzling skate skate's skateboard skateboard's skateboarded skateboarding skateboards skated skater skater's skaters skates skating skein skein's skeins skeleton skeleton's skeletons skeptic skeptic's skeptical skepticism skepticism's skeptics sketch sketch's sketched sketches sketchier sketchiest sketching sketchy skew skew's skewed skewer skewer's skewered skewering skewers skewing skews ski ski's skid skid's skidded skidding skids skied skies skiing skill skill's skilled skillet skillet's skillets skillful skills skim skim's skimmed skimming skimp skimped skimpier skimpiest skimping skimps skimpy skims skin skin's skinflint skinflint's skinflints skinned skinnier skinniest skinning skinny skinny's skins skip skip's skipped skipper skipper's skippered skippering skippers skipping skips skirmish skirmish's skirmished skirmishes skirmishing skirt skirt's skirted skirting skirts skis skit skit's skits skittish skulk skulked skulking skulks skull skull's skulls skunk skunk's skunked skunking skunks sky sky's skying skylight skylight's skylights skyline skyline's skylines skyrocket skyrocket's skyrocketed skyrocketing skyrockets skyscraper skyscraper's skyscrapers slab slab's slabbed slabbing slabs slack slack's slacked slacken slackened slackening slackens slacker slackest slacking slacks slag slain slake slaked slakes slaking slam slam's slammed slamming slams slander slander's slandered slandering slanders slang slang's slant slant's slanted slanting slants slap slap's slapped slapping slaps slapstick slapstick's slash slash's slashed slashes slashing slat slat's slate slate's slated slates slating slats slaughter slaughter's slaughtered slaughtering slaughters slave slave's slaved slavery slavery's slaves slaving slavish slay slaying slays sleazier sleaziest sleazy sled sled's sledded sledding sledgehammer sleds sleek sleeked sleeker sleekest sleeking sleeks sleep sleep's sleeper sleeper's sleepers sleepier sleepiest sleeping sleepless sleeps sleepy sleet sleet's sleeted sleeting sleets sleeve sleeve's sleeveless sleeves sleigh sleigh's sleighed sleighing sleighs slender slenderer slenderest slept slew slew's slewed slewing slews slice slice's sliced slices slicing slick slick's slicked slicker slickest slicking slicks slid slide slide's slides sliding slier sliest slight slight's slighted slighter slightest slighting slightly slights slim slime slime's slimier slimiest slimmed slimmer slimmest slimming slims slimy sling sling's slinging slings slingshot slingshot's slingshots slink slinking slinks slip slip's slipped slipper slipper's slipperier slipperiest slippers slippery slipping slips slipshod slit slit's slither slither's slithered slithering slithers slits slitter slitting sliver sliver's slivered slivering slivers slob slob's slobber slobber's slobbered slobbering slobbers slobs slog slog's slogan slogan's slogans slogged slogging slogs slop slop's slope slope's sloped slopes sloping slopped sloppier sloppiest slopping sloppy slops slosh sloshed sloshes sloshing slot slot's sloth sloth's slothful sloths slots slotted slotting slouch slouch's slouched slouches slouching slovenlier slovenliest slovenly slow slowed slower slowest slowing slowly slowness slows sludge sludge's slug slug's slugged slugging sluggish slugs sluice sluice's sluiced sluices sluicing slum slum's slumber slumber's slumbered slumbering slumbers slummed slummer slumming slump slump's slumped slumping slumps slums slung slunk slur slur's slurred slurring slurs slush slush's slut slut's sluts sly slyness slyness's smack smack's smacked smacking smacks small small's smaller smallest smallish smallpox smallpox's smalls smart smart's smarted smarter smartest smarting smartly smarts smash smash's smashed smashes smashing smattering smattering's smatterings smear smear's smeared smearing smears smell smell's smelled smellier smelliest smelling smells smelly smelt smelt's smelted smelting smelts smidgen smidgen's smidgens smile smile's smiled smiles smiling smirk smirk's smirked smirking smirks smite smites smith smith's smithereens smithereens's smiths smiting smitten smock smock's smocked smocking smocks smog smog's smoke smoke's smoked smoker smoker's smokers smokes smokestack smokestack's smokestacks smokier smokiest smoking smoky smolder smolder's smoldered smoldering smolders smooth smoothed smoother smoothest smoothing smoothly smoothness smoothness's smooths smote smother smother's smothered smothering smothers smudge smudge's smudged smudges smudging smug smugger smuggest smuggle smuggled smuggler smuggler's smugglers smuggles smuggling smugly smut smut's smuts snack snack's snacked snacking snacks snag snag's snagged snagging snags snail snail's snailed snailing snails snake snake's snaked snakes snaking snap snap's snapped snappier snappiest snapping snappy snaps snapshot snapshot's snapshots snare snare's snared snares snaring snarl snarl's snarled snarling snarls snatch snatch's snatched snatches snatching sneak sneak's sneaked sneaker sneaker's sneakers sneakier sneakiest sneaking sneaks sneaky sneer sneer's sneered sneering sneers sneeze sneeze's sneezed sneezes sneezing snicker snicker's snickered snickering snickers snide snider snidest sniff sniff's sniffed sniffing sniffle sniffle's sniffled sniffles sniffling sniffs snip snip's snipe snipe's sniped sniper sniper's snipers snipes sniping snipped snippet snippet's snippets snipping snips snitch snitch's snitched snitches snitching snob snob's snobbery snobbery's snobbish snobs snooker snoop snoop's snooped snooping snoops snootier snootiest snooty snooze snooze's snoozed snoozes snoozing snore snore's snored snores snoring snorkel snorkel's snorkeled snorkeling snorkels snort snort's snorted snorting snorts snot snot's snots snout snout's snouts snow snow's snowball snowball's snowballed snowballing snowballs snowdrift snowdrift's snowdrifts snowed snowfall snowfall's snowfalls snowflake snowflake's snowflakes snowier snowiest snowing snowplow snowplow's snowplowed snowplowing snowplows snows snowstorm snowstorm's snowstorms snowy snub snub's snubbed snubbing snubs snuff snuff's snuffed snuffer snuffing snuffs snug snug's snugged snugger snuggest snugging snuggle snuggle's snuggled snuggles snuggling snugly snugs so soak soak's soaked soaking soaks soap soap's soaped soapier soapiest soaping soaps soapy soar soar's soared soaring soars sob sob's sobbed sobbing sober sobered soberer soberest sobering sobers sobriety sobriety's sobs soccer soccer's sociable sociable's sociables social social's socialism socialism's socialist socialist's socialists socialize socialized socializes socializing socially socials societies society society's sociological sociologist sociologist's sociologists sociology sociology's sock sock's socked socket socket's sockets socking socks sod sod's soda soda's sodas sodded sodden sodding sodium sodium's sodomy sods sofa sofa's sofas soft softball softball's softballs soften softened softening softens softer softest softly softness softness's software software's soggier soggiest soggy soil soil's soiled soiling soils sojourn sojourn's sojourned sojourning sojourns solace solace's solaced solaces solacing solar sold solder solder's soldered soldering solders soldier soldier's soldiered soldiering soldiers sole sole's soled solely solemn solemner solemnest solemnity solemnity's solemnly soles solicit solicited soliciting solicitor solicitor's solicitors solicitous solicits solid solid's solidarity solider solidest solidified solidifies solidify solidifying solidity solidity's solidly solids soling solitaire solitaire's solitaires solitaries solitary solitary's solitude solitude's solo solo's soloed soloing soloist soloist's soloists solos soluble soluble's solubles solution solution's solutions solve solved solvent solvent's solvents solves solving somber some somebodies somebody somebody's someday somehow someone someone's someones someplace somersault somersault's somersaulted somersaulting somersaults something something's somethings sometime sometimes somewhat somewhats somewhere son son's sonata sonata's sonatas song song's songs sonic sonnet sonnet's sonnets sonorous sons soon sooner soonest soot soot's soothe soothed soothes soothing sootier sootiest sooty sop sop's sophisticate sophisticated sophisticates sophisticating sophistication sophistry sophomore sophomore's sophomores sopped sopping soprano soprano's sopranos sops sorcerer sorcerer's sorcerers sorceress sorceress's sorceresses sorcery sorcery's sordid sore sore's sorely sorer sores sorest sororities sorority sorority's sorrier sorriest sorrow sorrow's sorrowed sorrowful sorrowing sorrows sorry sort sort's sorta sorted sorting sorts souffle souffle's souffles sought soul soul's souls sound sound's sounded sounder soundest sounding soundly soundproof soundproofed soundproofing soundproofs sounds soundtrack soup soup's souped souping soups sour sour's source source's sourced sources sourcing soured sourer sourest souring sours south south's southeast southeast's southeastern southerlies southerly southerly's southern southern's southerner southerner's southerners southerns southpaw southpaw's southpaws southward southward's southwest southwest's southwestern souvenir souvenir's souvenirs sovereign sovereign's sovereigns sovereignty sovereignty's sow sow's sowed sowing sown sows spa spa's space space's spacecraft spacecraft's spacecrafts spaced spaces spaceship spaceship's spaceships spacial spacing spacious spade spade's spaded spades spading spaghetti spaghetti's span span's spangle spangle's spangled spangles spangling spaniel spaniel's spaniels spank spank's spanked spanking spanking's spankings spanks spanned spanner spanner's spanners spanning spans spar spar's spare spare's spared sparer spares sparest sparing spark spark's sparked sparking sparkle sparkle's sparkled sparkler sparkler's sparklers sparkles sparkling sparks sparred sparring sparrow sparrow's sparrows spars sparse sparsely sparser sparsest spas spasm spasm's spasmodic spasms spat spat's spate spatial spats spatted spatter spatter's spattered spattering spatters spatting spatula spatula's spatulas spawn spawn's spawned spawning spawns spay spayed spaying spays speak speaker speaker's speakers speaking speaks spear spear's speared spearhead spearhead's spearheaded spearheading spearheads spearing spearmint spearmint's spears special special's specialist specialist's specialists specialization specialization's specializations specialize specialized specializes specializing specially specials specialties specialty specialty's species species's specific specific's specifically specification specification's specifications specifics specified specifier specifies specify specifying specimen specimen's specimens specious speck speck's specked specking specks spectacle spectacle's spectacles spectacular spectacular's spectacularly spectaculars spectator spectator's spectators specter specter's specters spectra spectrum spectrum's speculate speculated speculates speculating speculation speculation's speculations speculative speculator speculator's speculators sped speech speech's speeches speechless speed speed's speedboat speedboat's speedboats speedier speediest speeding speedometer speedometer's speedometers speeds speedy spell spell's spellbind spellbinding spellbinds spellbound spelled speller spelling spelling's spellings spells spend spending spends spendthrift spendthrift's spendthrifts spent sperm sperm's sperms spew spew's spewed spewing spews sphere sphere's spheres spherical sphinx sphinx's sphinxes spice spice's spiced spices spicier spiciest spicing spicy spider spider's spiders spied spies spigot spigot's spigots spike spike's spiked spikes spiking spill spill's spilled spilling spills spin spin's spinach spinach's spinal spinal's spinals spindlier spindliest spindly spine spine's spineless spines spinning spins spinster spinster's spinsters spiral spiral's spiraled spiraling spirals spire spire's spires spirit spirit's spirited spiriting spirits spiritual spiritual's spiritually spirituals spit spit's spite spite's spited spiteful spitefuller spitefullest spites spiting spits spitted spitting spittle spittle's splash splash's splashed splashes splashing splat splatter splatter's splattered splattering splatters spleen spleen's spleens splendid splendider splendidest splendidly splendor splendor's splice splice's spliced splices splicing splint splint's splinted splinter splinter's splintered splintering splinters splinting splints split split's splits splitting splurge splurge's splurged splurges splurging spoil spoil's spoiled spoiling spoils spoke spoke's spoken spokes spokesman spokesman's spokesmen spokespeople spokesperson spokesperson's spokespersons spokeswoman spokeswoman's spokeswomen sponge sponge's sponged sponges spongier spongiest sponging spongy sponsor sponsor's sponsored sponsoring sponsors sponsorship spontaneity spontaneity's spontaneous spontaneously spoof spoof's spoofed spoofing spoofs spook spook's spooked spookier spookiest spooking spooks spooky spool spool's spooled spooling spools spoon spoon's spooned spoonful spoonful's spoonfuls spooning spoons sporadic spore spore's spores sporran sport sport's sported sporting sports sportsmanship sportsmanship's spot spot's spotless spotlight spotlight's spotlighted spotlighting spotlights spots spotted spottier spottiest spotting spotty spouse spouse's spouses spout spout's spouted spouting spouts sprain sprain's sprained spraining sprains sprang sprawl sprawl's sprawled sprawling sprawls spray spray's sprayed spraying sprays spread spread's spreading spreads spreadsheet spreadsheet's spreadsheets spree spree's spreed spreeing sprees sprier spriest sprig sprig's sprigs spring spring's springboard springboard's springboards springier springiest springing springs springtime springtime's springy sprinkle sprinkle's sprinkled sprinkler sprinkler's sprinklers sprinkles sprinkling sprinkling's sprinklings sprint sprint's sprinted sprinter sprinter's sprinters sprinting sprints sprout sprout's sprouted sprouting sprouts spruce spruce's spruced sprucer spruces sprucest sprucing sprung spry spud spud's spuds spun spunk spunk's spur spur's spurious spurn spurned spurning spurns spurred spurring spurs spurt spurt's spurted spurting spurts sputter sputter's sputtered sputtering sputters spy spy's spying squabble squabble's squabbled squabbles squabbling squad squad's squadron squadron's squadrons squads squalid squalider squalidest squall squall's squalled squalling squalls squalor squalor's squander squandered squandering squanders square square's squared squarely squarer squares squarest squaring squash squash's squashed squashes squashing squat squat's squats squatted squatter squattest squatting squawk squawk's squawked squawking squawks squeak squeak's squeaked squeakier squeakiest squeaking squeaks squeaky squeal squeal's squealed squealing squeals squeamish squeeze squeeze's squeezed squeezes squeezing squelch squelch's squelched squelches squelching squid squid's squids squint squint's squinted squinter squintest squinting squints squire squire's squired squires squiring squirm squirm's squirmed squirming squirms squirrel squirrel's squirreled squirreling squirrels squirt squirt's squirted squirting squirts stab stab's stabbed stabbing stability stability's stabilize stabilized stabilizes stabilizing stable stable's stabled stabler stables stablest stabling stabs stack stack's stacked stacking stacks stadium stadium's stadiums staff staff's staffed staffing staffs stag stag's stage stage's stagecoach stagecoach's stagecoaches staged stages stagger stagger's staggered staggering staggers staging stagnant stagnate stagnated stagnates stagnating stagnation stagnation's stags staid staider staidest stain stain's stained staining stains stair stair's staircase staircase's staircases stairs stairway stairway's stairways stake stake's staked stakes staking stale staled stalemate stalemate's stalemated stalemates stalemating staler stales stalest staling stalk stalk's stalked stalking stalks stall stall's stalled stalling stallion stallion's stallions stalls stalwart stalwart's stalwarts stamina stamina's stammer stammer's stammered stammering stammers stamp stamp's stamped stampede stampede's stampeded stampedes stampeding stamping stamps stance stance's stances stanch stanched stancher stanches stanchest stanching stand stand's standard standard's standardization standardization's standardize standardized standardizes standardizing standards standby standby's standbys standing standing's standings standoff standoff's standoffs standpoint standpoint's standpoints stands standstill standstill's standstills stank stanza stanza's stanzas staple staple's stapled stapler stapler's staplers staples stapling star star's starboard starboard's starch starch's starched starches starchier starchiest starching starchy stardom stardom's stare stare's stared stares starfish starfish's starfishes staring stark starker starkest starlight starlight's starred starrier starriest starring starry stars start start's started starter starter's starters starting startle startled startles startling startlingly starts starvation starvation's starve starved starves starving state state's stated statelier stateliest stately statement statement's statements stater states statesman statesman's statesmanship statesmanship's statesmen static static's stating station station's stationary stationed stationery stationery's stationing stations statistic statistic's statistical statistically statistician statistician's statisticians statistics statue statue's statues stature stature's statures status status's statuses statute statute's statutes statutory staunch staunched stauncher staunches staunchest staunching staunchly stave stave's staved staves staving stay stay's stayed staying stays steadfast steadied steadier steadies steadiest steadily steady steady's steadying steak steak's steaks steal steal's stealing steals stealth stealth's stealthier stealthiest stealthily stealthy steam steam's steamed steamier steamiest steaming steamroller steamroller's steamrollered steamrollering steamrollers steams steamy steel steel's steeled steeling steels steep steep's steeped steeper steepest steeping steeple steeple's steeples steeps steer steer's steered steering steers stellar stem stem's stemmed stemming stems stench stench's stenches stencil stencil's stenciled stenciling stencils stenographer stenographer's stenographers stenography stenography's step step's stepladder stepladder's stepladders stepped stepping steps stereo stereo's stereos stereotype stereotype's stereotyped stereotypes stereotyping sterile sterilization sterilization's sterilize sterilized sterilizes sterilizing sterling sterling's stern stern's sterner sternest sternly sternness sternness's sterns stethoscope stethoscope's stethoscopes stew stew's steward steward's stewarded stewardess stewardess's stewardesses stewarding stewards stewed stewing stews stick stick's sticker sticker's stickers stickier stickies stickiest sticking stickler stickler's sticklers sticks sticky sticky's stiff stiff's stiffed stiffen stiffened stiffening stiffens stiffer stiffest stiffing stiffly stiffness stiffness's stiffs stifle stifled stifles stifling stigma stigma's stigmas stigmata still still's stillborn stilled stiller stillest stilling stillness stillness's stills stilted stimulant stimulant's stimulants stimulate stimulated stimulates stimulating stimulation stimulation's stimuli stimulus stimulus's sting sting's stinger stinger's stingers stingier stingiest stinginess stinginess's stinging stings stingy stink stink's stinking stinks stint stint's stinted stinting stints stipulate stipulated stipulates stipulating stipulation stipulation's stipulations stir stir's stirred stirring stirrup stirrup's stirrups stirs stitch stitch's stitched stitches stitching stock stock's stockade stockade's stockaded stockades stockading stockbroker stockbroker's stockbrokers stocked stockholder stockholder's stockholders stockier stockiest stocking stocking's stockings stockpile stockpile's stockpiled stockpiles stockpiling stocks stocky stockyard stockyard's stockyards stodgier stodgiest stodgy stoical stoke stoked stokes stoking stole stole's stolen stoles stolid stolider stolidest stolidly stomach stomach's stomached stomaching stomachs stomp stomp's stomped stomping stomps stone stone's stoned stones stonier stoniest stoning stony stood stool stool's stools stoop stoop's stooped stooping stoops stop stop's stopgap stopgap's stopgaps stopover stopover's stopovers stoppage stoppage's stoppages stopped stopper stopper's stoppered stoppering stoppers stopping stops stopwatch stopwatch's stopwatches storage storage's store store's stored storehouse storehouse's storehouses storekeeper storekeeper's storekeepers storeroom storeroom's storerooms stores stories storing stork stork's storks storm storm's stormed stormier stormiest storming storms stormy story story's stout stout's stouter stoutest stove stove's stoves stow stowaway stowaway's stowaways stowed stowing stows straddle straddle's straddled straddles straddling straggle straggled straggler straggler's stragglers straggles straggling straight straight's straighten straightened straightening straightens straighter straightest straightforward straightforwardly straights strain strain's strained strainer strainer's strainers straining strains strait strait's straitjacket straitjacket's straitjacketed straitjacketing straitjackets straits strand strand's stranded stranding strands strange strangely strangeness strangeness's stranger stranger's strangers strangest strangle strangled strangles strangling strangulation strap strap's strapped strapping straps strata stratagem stratagem's stratagems strategic strategies strategy strategy's stratified stratifies stratify stratifying stratosphere stratosphere's stratospheres stratum stratum's straw straw's strawberries strawberry strawberry's strawed strawing straws stray stray's strayed straying strays streak streak's streaked streaking streaks stream stream's streamed streamer streamer's streamers streaming streamline streamlined streamlines streamlining streams street street's streetcar streetcar's streetcars streets strength strength's strengthen strengthened strengthening strengthens strengths strenuous strenuously stress stress's stressed stresses stressful stressing stretch stretch's stretched stretcher stretcher's stretchers stretches stretching strew strewed strewing strewn strews stricken strict stricter strictest strictly strictness strictness's stridden stride stride's strides striding strife strife's strike strike's striker striker's strikers strikes striking strikings string string's stringent stringier stringiest stringing strings stringy strip strip's stripe stripe's striped stripes striping stripped stripper stripping strips strive striven strives striving strode stroke stroke's stroked strokes stroking stroll stroll's strolled stroller stroller's strollers strolling strolls strong stronger strongest stronghold stronghold's strongholds strongly strove struck structural structuralist structure structure's structured structures structuring struggle struggle's struggled struggles struggling strum strum's strummed strumming strums strung strut strut's struts strutted strutting stub stub's stubbed stubbier stubbiest stubbing stubble stubble's stubborn stubborner stubbornest stubby stubs stuck stud stud's studded studding student student's students studentship studied studies studio studio's studios studious studs study study's studying stuff stuff's stuffed stuffier stuffiest stuffing stuffing's stuffs stuffy stumble stumble's stumbled stumbles stumbling stump stump's stumped stumping stumps stun stung stunk stunned stunning stuns stunt stunt's stunted stunting stunts stupefied stupefies stupefy stupefying stupendous stupid stupid's stupider stupidest stupidities stupidity stupidity's stupidly stupids stupor stupor's stupors sturdier sturdiest sturdy stutter stutter's stuttered stuttering stutters style style's styled styles styling stylish stylistic stylus suave suaver suavest sub sub's subbed subbing subcommittee subcommittee's subcommittees subconscious subconsciously subdivide subdivided subdivides subdividing subdivision subdivision's subdivisions subdue subdued subdues subduing subgroup subject subject's subjected subjecting subjective subjects subjugate subjugated subjugates subjugating subjunctive sublet sublet's sublets subletting sublime sublimed sublimer sublimes sublimest subliming submarine submarine's submarines submerge submerged submerges submerging submersion submersion's submission submission's submissions submissive submit submits submitted submitting subnormal subordinate subordinate's subordinated subordinates subordinating subprogram subroutine subroutine's subroutines subs subscribe subscribed subscriber subscriber's subscribers subscribes subscribing subscript subscript's subscription subscription's subscriptions subscripts subsection subsection's subsections subsequent subsequently subservient subset subset's subsets subside subsided subsides subsidiaries subsidiary subsidiary's subsidies subsiding subsidize subsidized subsidizes subsidizing subsidy subsidy's subsist subsisted subsistence subsistence's subsisting subsists substance substance's substances substandard substantial substantially substantiate substantiated substantiates substantiating substitute substitute's substituted substitutes substituting substitution substitution's substitutions subsystem subterfuge subterfuge's subterfuges subterranean subtle subtler subtlest subtleties subtlety subtlety's subtly subtract subtracted subtracting subtraction subtraction's subtractions subtracts suburb suburb's suburban suburban's suburbans suburbs subversive subversive's subversives subvert subverted subverting subverts subway subway's subways succeed succeeded succeeding succeeds success success's successes successful successfully succession succession's successions successive successively successor successor's successors succinct succincter succinctest succinctly succor succor's succored succoring succors succulent succulent's succulents succumb succumbed succumbing succumbs such suck suck's sucked sucker sucker's suckered suckering suckers sucking suckle suckled suckles suckling sucks suction suction's suctioned suctioning suctions sudden suddenly suds suds's sue sued suede suede's sues suffer suffered sufferer sufferer's sufferers suffering suffering's sufferings suffers suffice sufficed suffices sufficient sufficiently sufficing suffix suffix's suffixed suffixes suffixing suffocate suffocated suffocates suffocating suffocation suffocation's suffrage suffrage's sugar sugar's sugared sugarier sugariest sugaring sugars sugary suggest suggested suggester suggesting suggestion suggestion's suggestions suggestive suggests suicidal suicide suicide's suicides suing suit suit's suitability suitability's suitable suitably suitcase suitcase's suitcases suite suite's suited suites suiting suitor suitor's suitors suits sulfur sulfur's sulk sulk's sulked sulkier sulkies sulkiest sulking sulks sulky sulky's sullen sullener sullenest sultan sultan's sultans sultrier sultriest sultry sum sum's summaries summarily summarize summarized summarizes summarizing summary summary's summed summer summer's summered summering summers summing summit summit's summits summon summoned summoning summons summons's summonsed summonses summonsing sumptuous sums sun sun's sunbathe sunbathed sunbathes sunbathing sunburn sunburn's sunburned sunburning sunburns sundae sundae's sundaes sundial sundial's sundials sundown sundown's sundowns sundries sundry sunflower sunflower's sunflowers sung sunglasses sunglasses's sunk sunken sunlight sunlight's sunlit sunned sunnier sunniest sunning sunny sunrise sunrise's sunrises suns sunscreen sunscreen's sunscreens sunset sunset's sunsets sunshine sunshine's suntan suntan's suntanned suntanning suntans sunup sunup's sup super super's superb superber superbest superbly supercomputer supercomputer's supercomputers superficial superficially superfluous superhuman superimpose superimposed superimposes superimposing superintendent superintendent's superintendents superior superior's superiority superiority's superiors superlative superlative's superlatives supermarket supermarket's supermarkets supernatural supernaturals supers superscript superscript's superscripts supersede superseded supersedes superseding supersonic superstar superstar's superstars superstition superstition's superstitions superstitious superstructure superstructure's superstructures supervise supervised supervises supervising supervision supervision's supervisions supervisor supervisor's supervisors supervisory supper supper's suppers supplant supplanted supplanting supplants supple supplement supplement's supplementary supplemented supplementing supplements suppler supplest supplied supplier supplier's suppliers supplies supply supply's supplying support support's supported supporter supporter's supporters supporting supportive supports suppose supposed supposedly supposes supposing supposition supposition's suppositions suppress suppressed suppresses suppressing suppression suppression's supremacy supremacy's supreme supremely surcharge surcharge's surcharged surcharges surcharging sure surely surer surest surf surf's surface surface's surfaced surfaces surfacing surfboard surfboard's surfboarded surfboarding surfboards surfed surfing surfing's surfs surge surge's surged surgeon surgeon's surgeons surgeries surgery surgery's surges surgical surging surlier surliest surly surmise surmise's surmised surmises surmising surmount surmounted surmounting surmounts surname surname's surnames surpass surpassed surpasses surpassing surplus surplus's surpluses surplussed surplussing surprise surprise's surprised surprises surprising surprisingly surreal surrender surrender's surrendered surrendering surrenders surreptitious surround surrounded surrounding surrounding's surroundings surroundings's surrounds surveillance surveillance's survey survey's surveyed surveying surveyor surveyor's surveyors surveys survival survival's survivals survive survived survives surviving survivor survivor's survivors susceptible suspect suspect's suspected suspecting suspects suspend suspended suspender suspender's suspenders suspending suspends suspense suspense's suspension suspension's suspensions suspicion suspicion's suspicions suspicious suspiciously sustain sustainable sustained sustaining sustains sustenance sustenance's swab swab's swabbed swabbing swabs swagger swagger's swaggered swaggerer swaggering swaggers swallow swallow's swallowed swallowing swallows swam swamp swamp's swamped swampier swampiest swamping swamps swampy swan swan's swans swap swap's swapped swapping swaps swarm swarm's swarmed swarming swarms swarthier swarthiest swarthy swat swat's swathe swathe's swathed swathes swathing swats swatted swatting sway sway's swayed swaying sways swear swearing swears sweat sweat's sweater sweater's sweaters sweating sweats sweaty sweep sweep's sweeper sweeper's sweepers sweeping sweeping's sweepings sweeps sweepstakes sweepstakes's sweet sweet's sweeten sweetened sweetening sweetens sweeter sweetest sweetheart sweetheart's sweethearts sweetly sweetness sweetness's sweets swell swell's swelled sweller swellest swelling swelling's swellings swells swept swerve swerve's swerved swerves swerving swift swift's swifter swiftest swiftly swifts swig swig's swigged swigging swigs swill swill's swilled swilling swills swim swim's swimming swims swindle swindle's swindled swindler swindler's swindlers swindles swindling swine swine's swines swing swing's swinging swings swipe swipe's swiped swipes swiping swirl swirl's swirled swirling swirls swish swish's swished swisher swishes swishest swishing switch switch's switchable switchboard switchboard's switchboards switched switcher switches switching swivel swivel's swiveled swiveling swivels swollen swoon swoon's swooned swooning swoons swoop swoop's swooped swooping swoops sword sword's swordfish swordfish's swordfishes swords swore sworn swum swung syllable syllable's syllables syllabus syllabus's syllabuses symbol symbol's symbolic symbolism symbolize symbolized symbolizes symbolizing symbols symmetric symmetrical symmetry symmetry's sympathetic sympathetically sympathies sympathize sympathized sympathizes sympathizing sympathy sympathy's symphonic symphonies symphony symphony's symptom symptom's symptomatic symptoms synagogue synagogue's synagogues synapse synapse's synapses synchronization synchronize synchronized synchronizes synchronizing synchronous syndicate syndicate's syndicated syndicates syndicating syndrome syndrome's syndromes synonym synonym's synonymous synonyms synopses synopsis synopsis's syntactic syntactically syntax syntax's syntheses synthesis synthesis's synthesize synthesized synthesizer synthesizer's synthesizers synthesizes synthesizing synthetic synthetic's synthetics syphilis syphilis's syringe syringe's syringed syringes syringing syrup syrup's syrups system system's systematic systematically systems tab tab's tabbed tabbies tabbing tabby tabby's tabernacle tabernacle's tabernacles table table's tablecloth tablecloth's tablecloths tabled tables tablespoon tablespoon's tablespoonful tablespoonful's tablespoonfuls tablespoons tablet tablet's tablets tabling tabloid tabloid's tabloids taboo taboo's tabooed tabooing taboos tabs tabulate tabulated tabulates tabulating tabulation tabulation's tacit tacitly taciturn tack tack's tacked tackier tackiest tacking tackle tackle's tackled tackles tackling tacks tacky taco taco's tacos tact tact's tactful tactfully tactic tactic's tactical tactics tactless tactlessly tadpole tadpole's tadpoles tag tag's tagged tagging tags tail tail's tailed tailgate tailgate's tailgated tailgates tailgating tailing taillight taillight's taillights tailor tailor's tailored tailoring tailors tails tailspin tailspin's tailspins taint taint's tainted tainting taints take take's taken takeoff takeoff's takeoffs takeover taker taker's takers takes taking talc talc's tale tale's talent talent's talented talents tales talisman talisman's talismans talk talk's talkative talked talker talker's talkers talking talks tall taller tallest tallied tallies tallow tallow's tally tally's tallying talon talon's talons tambourine tambourine's tambourines tame tamed tamely tameness tameness's tamer tames tamest taming tamper tampered tampering tampers tan tan's tandem tandem's tandems tang tang's tangent tangent's tangential tangents tangerine tangerine's tangerines tangible tangible's tangibles tangle tangle's tangled tangles tangling tango tango's tangoed tangoing tangos tangs tank tank's tankard tankard's tankards tanked tanker tanker's tankers tanking tanks tanned tanner tannest tanning tans tantalize tantalized tantalizes tantalizing tantamount tantrum tantrum's tantrums tap tap's tape tape's taped taper taper's tapered tapering tapers tapes tapestries tapestry tapestry's taping tapped tapping taps tar tar's tarantula tarantula's tarantulas tardier tardiest tardiness tardiness's tardy target target's targeted targeting targets tariff tariff's tariffs tarnish tarnish's tarnished tarnishes tarnishing tarpaulin tarpaulin's tarpaulins tarred tarried tarrier tarries tarriest tarring tarry tarrying tars tart tart's tartan tartan's tartans tartar tartar's tartars tarter tartest tarts task task's tasked tasking tasks tassel tassel's tasseled tasseling tassels taste taste's tasted tasteful tastefully tasteless tastes tastier tastiest tasting tasty tattle tattle's tattled tattles tattling tattoo tattoo's tattooed tattooing tattoos tatty taught taunt taunt's taunted taunting taunts taut tauter tautest tautology tavern tavern's taverns tawdrier tawdriest tawdry tawnier tawniest tawny tawny's tax tax's taxable taxation taxation's taxed taxes taxi taxi's taxicab taxicab's taxicabs taxied taxiing taxing taxis taxpayer taxpayer's taxpayers tea tea's teach teacher teacher's teachers teaches teaching teaching's teachings teacup teacup's teacups teak teak's teaks team team's teamed teaming teammate teammate's teammates teams teamster teamster's teamsters teamwork teamwork's teapot teapot's teapots tear tear's teardrop teardrop's teardrops teared tearful tearing tears teas tease tease's teased teases teasing teaspoon teaspoon's teaspoons teat teat's teats technical technicalities technicality technicality's technically technician technician's technicians technique technique's techniques technological technologically technologies technology technology's tedious tediously tedium tedium's tee tee's teed teeing teem teemed teeming teems teen teen's teenage teenager teenager's teenagers teens tees teeter teeter's teetered teetering teeters teeth teethe teethed teethes teething teetotal teetotaler teetotaler's teetotalers telecommunications telegram telegram's telegrams telegraph telegraph's telegraphed telegraphing telegraphs telepathic telepathy telepathy's telephone telephone's telephoned telephones telephoning telescope telescope's telescoped telescopes telescoping teletype televise televised televises televising television television's televisions tell teller teller's tellers telling tells telltale telltale's telltales temper temper's temperament temperament's temperamental temperaments temperance temperance's temperate temperature temperature's temperatures tempered tempering tempers tempest tempest's tempests tempestuous template temple temple's temples tempo tempo's temporal temporaries temporarily temporary temporary's tempos tempt temptation temptation's temptations tempted tempting tempts ten ten's tenable tenacious tenacity tenacity's tenancies tenancy tenancy's tenant tenant's tenanted tenanting tenants tend tended tendencies tendency tendency's tender tender's tendered tenderer tenderest tendering tenderize tenderized tenderizes tenderizing tenderly tenderness tenderness's tenders tending tendon tendon's tendons tendril tendril's tendrils tends tenement tenement's tenements tenet tenet's tenets tennis tennis's tenor tenor's tenors tens tense tense's tensed tenser tenses tensest tensing tension tension's tensions tensors tent tent's tentacle tentacle's tentacles tentative tentatively tented tenth tenth's tenths tenting tents tenuous tenure tenure's tenured tenures tenuring tepee tepee's tepees tepid term term's termed terminal terminal's terminally terminals terminate terminated terminates terminating termination terminator terminators terming termini terminologies terminology terminology's terminus terminus's termite termite's termites termly terms terrace terrace's terraced terraces terracing terrain terrain's terrains terrestrial terrestrial's terrestrials terrible terribly terrier terrier's terriers terrific terrified terrifies terrify terrifying territorial territorial's territorials territories territory territory's terror terror's terrorism terrorism's terrorist terrorist's terrorists terrorize terrorized terrorizes terrorizing terrors terse tersely terseness terseness's terser tersest test test's testable testament testament's testaments tested tester tester's testers testes testicle testicle's testicles testified testifies testify testifying testimonial testimonial's testimonials testimonies testimony testimony's testing testis testis's tests tetanus tetanus's tether tether's tethered tethering tethers text text's textbook textbook's textbooks textile textile's textiles texts textual textually texture texture's textured textures texturing than thank thanked thankful thankfully thanking thankless thanks that that's thatch thatch's thatched thatcher thatches thatching thaw thaw's thawed thawing thaws the theater theater's theaters theatrical thee theft theft's thefts their theirs theist theist's theists them theme theme's themes themselves then then's thence theologian theologian's theologians theological theologies theology theology's theorem theorem's theorems theoretic theoretical theoretically theories theorist theorist's theorists theorize theorized theorizes theorizing theory theory's therapeutic therapies therapist therapist's therapists therapy therapy's there there's thereabouts thereafter thereby therefore therein thereof thereon thereupon thermal thermal's thermals thermodynamics thermometer thermometer's thermometers thermostat thermostat's thermostats thesauri thesaurus thesaurus's thesauruses these theses thesis thesis's theta they they're thick thick's thicken thickened thickening thickens thicker thickest thicket thicket's thickets thickly thickness thickness's thicknesses thief thief's thieve thieves thigh thigh's thighs thimble thimble's thimbles thin thing thing's things think thinker thinker's thinkers thinking thinks thinly thinned thinner thinnest thinning thins third third's thirds thirst thirst's thirsted thirstier thirstiest thirsting thirsts thirsty thirteen thirteen's thirteens thirteenth thirteenth's thirteenths thirties thirtieth thirtieth's thirtieths thirty thirty's this thistle thistle's thistles thong thong's thongs thorn thorn's thornier thorniest thorns thorny thorough thoroughbred thoroughbred's thoroughbreds thorougher thoroughest thoroughfare thoroughfare's thoroughfares thoroughly those thou thou's though thought thought's thoughtful thoughtfully thoughtfulness thoughtfulness's thoughtless thoughtlessly thoughts thous thousand thousand's thousands thousandth thousandth's thousandths thrash thrash's thrashed thrashes thrashing thread thread's threadbare threaded threading threads threat threat's threaten threatened threatening threatens threats three three's threes thresh thresh's threshed thresher thresher's threshers threshes threshing threshold threshold's thresholds threw thrice thrift thrift's thriftier thriftiest thrifts thrifty thrill thrill's thrilled thriller thriller's thrillers thrilling thrills thrive thrived thrives thriving throat throat's throats throb throb's throbbed throbbing throbs throne throne's thrones throng throng's thronged thronging throngs throttle throttle's throttled throttles throttling through throughout throughput throw throw's throwaway throwback throwback's throwbacks throwing thrown throws thrust thrust's thrusting thrusts thud thud's thudded thudding thuds thug thug's thugs thumb thumb's thumbed thumbing thumbs thumbtack thumbtack's thumbtacks thump thump's thumped thumping thumps thunder thunder's thunderbolt thunderbolt's thunderbolts thundered thundering thunderous thunders thunderstorm thunderstorm's thunderstorms thunderstruck thus thwart thwart's thwarted thwarting thwarts thy thyme thyme's thyroid thyroid's thyroids tiara tiara's tiaras tick tick's ticked ticket ticket's ticketed ticketing tickets ticking tickle tickle's tickled tickles tickling ticklish ticks tidal tidbit tidbit's tidbits tide tide's tided tides tidied tidier tidies tidiest tiding tidy tidy's tidying tie tie's tied tier tier's tiers ties tiff tiff's tiffed tiffing tiffs tiger tiger's tigers tight tighten tightened tightening tightens tighter tightest tightly tightness tightness's tightrope tightrope's tightropes tights tights's tightwad tightwad's tightwads tilde tile tile's tiled tiles tiling till till's tilled tilling tills tilt tilt's tilted tilting tilts timber timber's timbered timbering timbers time time's timed timekeeper timekeeper's timekeepers timeless timelier timeliest timely timer timer's timers times timescale timescales timetable timetable's timetables timezone timid timider timidest timidity timidity's timidly timing timings tin tin's tinder tinder's ting tinge tinge's tinged tingeing tinges tinging tingle tingle's tingled tingles tingling tings tinier tiniest tinker tinker's tinkered tinkering tinkers tinkle tinkle's tinkled tinkles tinkling tinned tinnier tinniest tinning tinny tins tinsel tinsel's tinseled tinseling tinsels tint tint's tinted tinting tints tiny tip tip's tipped tipping tips tipsier tipsiest tipsy tiptoe tiptoe's tiptoed tiptoeing tiptoes tirade tirade's tirades tire tire's tired tireder tiredest tireless tires tiresome tiring tissue tissue's tissues tit tit's titillate titillated titillates titillating title title's titled titles titling tits titter titter's tittered tittering titters to toad toad's toads toadstool toadstool's toadstools toast toast's toasted toaster toaster's toasters toasting toasts tobacco tobacco's tobaccos toboggan toboggan's tobogganed tobogganing toboggans today today's toddle toddle's toddled toddler toddler's toddlers toddles toddling toe toe's toed toeing toenail toenail's toenails toes toffee toffee's toffees toga toga's togas together toggle toil toil's toiled toilet toilet's toileted toileting toilets toiling toils token token's tokens told tolerable tolerably tolerance tolerance's tolerances tolerant tolerate tolerated tolerates tolerating toll toll's tolled tolling tolls tomahawk tomahawk's tomahawked tomahawking tomahawks tomato tomato's tomatoes tomb tomb's tombed tombing tomboy tomboy's tomboys tombs tombstone tombstone's tombstones tomcat tomcat's tomcats tome tome's tomes tomorrow tomorrow's tomorrows ton ton's tonal tone tone's toned tones tong tong's tongs tongue tongue's tongued tongues tonguing tonic tonic's tonics tonight tonight's toning tonnage tonnage's tonnages tonne tonne's tonnes tons tonsil tonsil's tonsillitis tonsillitis's tonsils too took tool tool's tooled tooling toolkit tools toot toot's tooted tooth tooth's toothache toothache's toothaches toothbrush toothbrush's toothbrushes toothpaste toothpaste's toothpastes toothpick toothpick's toothpicks tooting toots top top's topaz topaz's topazes topic topic's topical topics topographies topography topography's topology topped topping topple toppled topples toppling tops torch torch's torched torches torching tore torment torment's tormented tormenting tormentor tormentor's tormentors torments torn tornado tornado's tornadoes torpedo torpedo's torpedoed torpedoes torpedoing torque torrent torrent's torrential torrents torrid torso torso's torsos tortilla tortilla's tortillas tortoise tortoise's tortoises tortuous torture torture's tortured tortures torturing toss toss's tossed tosses tossing tot tot's total total's totaled totaling totalitarian totalitarian's totalitarianism totalitarians totalities totality totality's totally totals tote tote's toted totem totem's totems totes toting tots totted totter totter's tottered tottering totters totting toucan toucan's toucans touch touch's touchdown touchdown's touchdowns touched touches touchier touchiest touching touchings touchy tough tough's toughen toughened toughening toughens tougher toughest toughness toughness's toughs toupee toupee's toupees tour tour's toured touring tourist tourist's tourists tournament tournament's tournaments tourniquet tourniquet's tourniquets tours tousle tousled tousles tousling tout touted touting touts tow tow's toward towards towed towel towel's toweled toweling towels tower tower's towered towering towers towing town town's towns townspeople tows toxic toxin toxin's toxins toy toy's toyed toying toys trace trace's traced traces tracing track track's tracked tracking tracks tract tract's traction traction's tractor tractor's tractors tracts trade trade's traded trademark trademark's trademarked trademarking trademarks trader trader's traders trades trading tradition tradition's traditional traditionalist traditionally traditions traffic traffic's trafficked trafficking traffics tragedies tragedy tragedy's tragic tragically trail trail's trailed trailer trailer's trailers trailing trails train train's trained trainee trainee's trainees trainer trainer's trainers training training's trains trait trait's traitor traitor's traitorous traitors traits tramp tramp's tramped tramping trample trample's trampled tramples trampling trampoline trampoline's trampolines tramps trance trance's trances tranquil tranquiler tranquilest tranquility tranquility's tranquilize tranquilized tranquilizer tranquilizer's tranquilizers tranquilizes tranquilizing transact transacted transacting transaction transaction's transactions transacts transatlantic transcend transcended transcending transcends transcontinental transcribe transcribed transcribes transcribing transcript transcript's transcription transcription's transcriptions transcripts transfer transfer's transferable transferred transferring transfers transform transform's transformation transformation's transformations transformed transformer transformer's transformers transforming transforms transfusion transfusion's transfusions transgress transgressed transgresses transgressing transgression transgression's transgressions transient transient's transients transistor transistor's transistors transit transit's transited transiting transition transition's transitional transitioned transitioning transitions transitive transitive's transitives transitory transits translate translated translates translating translation translation's translations translator translator's translators transliteration translucent transmission transmission's transmissions transmit transmits transmitted transmitter transmitter's transmitters transmitting transparencies transparency transparency's transparent transparently transpire transpired transpires transpiring transplant transplant's transplanted transplanting transplants transport transport's transportable transportation transportation's transported transporting transports transpose transposed transposes transposing transverse transverse's transverses trap trap's trapdoor trapeze trapeze's trapezes trapezoid trapezoid's trapezoids trapped trapper trapper's trappers trapping trappings trappings's traps trash trash's trashcan trashed trashes trashier trashiest trashing trashy trauma trauma's traumas traumatic traumatize traumatized traumatizes traumatizing travel travel's traveled traveler traveler's travelers traveling travelings travels traverse traverse's traversed traverses traversing travestied travesties travesty travesty's travestying trawl trawl's trawled trawler trawler's trawlers trawling trawls tray tray's trays treacheries treacherous treachery treachery's treacle tread tread's treading treadmill treadmill's treadmills treads treason treason's treasure treasure's treasured treasurer treasurer's treasurers treasures treasuries treasuring treasury treasury's treat treat's treated treaties treating treatise treatise's treatises treatment treatment's treatments treats treaty treaty's treble treble's trebled trebles trebling tree tree's treed treeing trees trek trek's trekked trekking treks trellis trellis's trellised trellises trellising tremble tremble's trembled trembles trembling tremendous tremendously tremor tremor's tremors trench trench's trenched trenches trenching trend trend's trended trendier trendies trendiest trending trends trendy trendy's trepidation trepidation's trespass trespass's trespassed trespasser trespasser's trespassers trespasses trespassing trestle trestle's trestles trial trial's trialed trialing trials triangle triangle's triangles triangular tribal tribe tribe's tribes tribulation tribulation's tribulations tribunal tribunal's tribunals tributaries tributary tributary's tribute tribute's tributes trick trick's tricked trickery trickery's trickier trickiest tricking trickle trickle's trickled trickles trickling tricks trickster trickster's tricksters tricky tricycle tricycle's tricycles tried tries trifle trifle's trifled trifles trifling trigger trigger's triggered triggering triggers trigonometry trigonometry's trill trill's trilled trilling trillion trillion's trillions trills trilogies trilogy trilogy's trim trim's trimester trimester's trimesters trimmed trimmer trimmest trimming trims trinity trinket trinket's trinkets trio trio's trios trip trip's tripe tripe's triple triple's tripled triples triplet triplet's triplets triplicate triplicate's triplicated triplicates triplicating tripling tripod tripod's tripods tripos tripped tripping trips trite triter tritest triumph triumph's triumphant triumphed triumphing triumphs trivia trivia's trivial triviality trivially trod trodden troll troll's trolled trolley trolley's trolleys trolling trolls trombone trombone's trombones troop troop's trooped trooper trooper's troopers trooping troops trophies trophy trophy's tropical trot trot's trots trotted trotting trouble trouble's troubled troublemaker troublemaker's troublemakers troubles troublesome troubling trough trough's troughs trounce trounced trounces trouncing troupe troupe's trouped troupes trouping trouser trouser's trousers trousers's trout trout's trouts trowel trowel's troweled troweling trowels truancy truancy's truant truant's truanted truanting truants truce truce's truces truck truck's trucked trucking trucks trudge trudge's trudged trudges trudging true true's trued truer trues truest truffle truffle's truffles truing truism truism's truisms truly trump trump's trumped trumpet trumpet's trumpeted trumpeting trumpets trumping trumps truncate truncated truncates truncating truncation trunk trunk's trunking trunks trust trust's trusted trustee trustee's trustees trustful trustier trusties trustiest trusting trusts trustworthier trustworthiest trustworthy trusty trusty's truth truth's truthful truthfully truthfulness truthfulness's truths try try's trying tryout tryout's tryouts tub tub's tuba tuba's tubas tube tube's tubed tuberculosis tuberculosis's tubes tubing tubing's tubs tubular tuck tuck's tucked tucking tucks tuft tuft's tufted tufting tufts tug tug's tugged tugging tugs tuition tuition's tulip tulip's tulips tumble tumble's tumbled tumbler tumbler's tumblers tumbles tumbling tummies tummy tummy's tumor tumor's tumors tumult tumult's tumults tumultuous tuna tuna's tunas tundra tundra's tundras tune tune's tuned tuneful tuner tuner's tuners tunes tunic tunic's tunics tuning tunnel tunnel's tunneled tunneling tunnelings tunnels turban turban's turbans turbine turbine's turbines turbulence turbulence's turbulent tureen tureen's tureens turf turf's turfed turfing turfs turgid turkey turkey's turkeys turmoil turmoil's turmoils turn turn's turnaround turned turner turning turnip turnip's turnips turnout turnout's turnouts turnover turnover's turnovers turnpike turnpike's turnpikes turns turnstile turnstile's turnstiles turntable turntable's turntables turpentine turpentine's turquoise turquoise's turquoises turret turret's turrets turtle turtle's turtleneck turtleneck's turtlenecks turtles tusk tusk's tusks tussle tussle's tussled tussles tussling tutor tutor's tutored tutorial tutorial's tutorials tutoring tutors tuxedo tuxedo's tuxedos twang twang's twanged twanging twangs tweak tweak's tweaked tweaking tweaks twee tweed tweed's tweet tweet's tweeted tweeting tweets tweezers tweezers's twelfth twelfth's twelfths twelve twelve's twelves twenties twentieth twentieth's twentieths twenty twenty's twice twiddle twiddle's twiddled twiddles twiddling twig twig's twigged twigging twigs twilight twilight's twin twin's twine twine's twined twines twinge twinge's twinged twinges twinging twining twinkle twinkle's twinkled twinkles twinkling twinned twinning twins twirl twirl's twirled twirling twirls twist twist's twisted twister twister's twisters twisting twists twitch twitch's twitched twitches twitching twitter twitter's twittered twittering twitters two two's twos tycoon tycoon's tycoons tying type type's typed typeface types typescript typeset typesets typesetter typesetting typewriter typewriter's typewriters typhoid typhoid's typhoon typhoon's typhoons typhus typhus's typical typically typified typifies typify typifying typing typist typist's typists typographic typographical tyrannical tyrannies tyrannize tyrannized tyrannizes tyrannizing tyranny tyranny's tyrant tyrant's tyrants ubiquitous udder udder's udders ugh uglier ugliest ugliness ugliness's ugly ulcer ulcer's ulcers ulterior ultimate ultimate's ultimately ultimatum ultimatum's ultimatums ultra ultrasonic ultraviolet ultraviolet's umbrella umbrella's umbrellas umpire umpire's umpired umpires umpiring umpteen unable unacceptable unacceptably unaccepted unaccountable unaccountably unadulterated unaffected unaltered unambiguous unambiguously unanimity unanimity's unanimous unanimously unanswerable unanswered unarmed unassigned unassuming unattached unattainable unattended unattractive unauthorized unavailable unavoidable unaware unawares unbalanced unbearable unbearably unbeatable unbecoming unbelievable unbelievably unbeliever unbeliever's unbelievers unbiased unblock unblocked unblocking unblocks unborn unbreakable unbroken unburden unburdened unburdening unburdens uncannier uncanniest uncanny unceasing uncertain uncertainties uncertainty uncertainty's unchallenged unchanged uncharitable unchristian uncle uncle's unclean uncleaner uncleanest unclear uncles uncomfortable uncomfortably uncommon uncommoner uncommonest uncompromising unconcerned unconditional unconditionally unconfirmed unconnected unconscious unconscious's unconsciously unconstitutional uncontrollable uncontrolled uncontroversial unconventional unconvinced unconvincing uncountable uncouth uncover uncovered uncovering uncovers uncultured uncut undamaged undaunted undecidable undecided undecided's undecideds undefined undemocratic undeniable undeniably under underbrush underbrush's undercover undercurrent undercurrent's undercurrents undercut undercuts undercutting underdog underdog's underdogs underestimate underestimate's underestimated underestimates underestimating underflow underfoot undergarment undergarment's undergarments undergo undergoes undergoing undergone undergraduate undergraduate's undergraduates underground underground's undergrounds undergrowth undergrowth's underhanded underlain underlay underlay's underlays underlie underlies underline underline's underlined underlines underlining underlying undermine undermined undermines undermining underneath underneath's underneaths undernourished underpants underpants's underpass underpass's underpasses underprivileged underrate underrated underrates underrating underscore underscore's underscored underscores underscoring undershirt undershirt's undershirts underside underside's undersides understand understandable understandably understanding understanding's understandings understands understate understated understatement understatement's understatements understates understating understood understudied understudies understudy understudy's understudying undertake undertaken undertaker undertaker's undertakers undertakes undertaking undertaking's undertakings undertone undertone's undertones undertook undertow undertow's undertows underwater underwear underwear's underweight underweight's underwent underworld underworld's underworlds underwrite underwrites underwriting underwritten underwrote undeserved undesirable undesirable's undesirables undetected undeveloped undid undisturbed undo undocumented undoes undoing undoing's undoings undone undoubted undoubtedly undress undress's undressed undresses undressing undue unduly undying unearth unearthed unearthing unearthly unearths uneasier uneasiest uneasily uneasiness uneasiness's uneasy uneconomic uneconomical uneducated unemployable unemployed unemployed's unemployment unemployment's unenlightened unequal unequaled unequivocal unerring unethical uneven unevenly uneventful unexpected unexpectedly unexplained unfailing unfair unfairer unfairest unfairly unfaithful unfamiliar unfasten unfastened unfastening unfastens unfavorable unfeasible unfeeling unfilled unfinished unfit unfits unfitted unfitting unfold unfolded unfolding unfolds unforeseen unforgettable unforgivable unfortunate unfortunate's unfortunately unfortunates unfounded unfriendlier unfriendliest unfriendly unfunny unfurl unfurled unfurling unfurls ungainlier ungainliest ungainly ungodlier ungodliest ungodly ungrammatical ungrateful unhappier unhappiest unhappily unhappiness unhappy unhealthier unhealthiest unhealthy unheard unhelpful unhook unhooked unhooking unhooks unicorn unicorn's unicorns unicycle unidentified unification unification's unified unifies uniform uniform's uniformed uniforming uniformity uniformity's uniformly uniforms unify unifying unilateral unilaterally unimaginative unimportant unimpressed uninformative uninformed uninhibited uninitiated uninspired uninspiring unintelligent unintelligible unintended unintentional unintentionally uninterested uninteresting union union's unionize unionized unionizes unionizing unions unique uniquely uniqueness uniquer uniquest unison unison's unit unit's unite united unites unities uniting units unity unity's universal universal's universally universals universe universe's universes universities university university's unjust unjustifiable unjustified unjustly unkempt unkind unkinder unkindest unkindlier unkindliest unkindly unknown unknown's unknowns unlabeled unlawful unleash unleashed unleashes unleashing unless unlike unlikelier unlikeliest unlikely unlimited unload unloaded unloading unloads unlock unlocked unlocking unlocks unluckier unluckiest unlucky unman unmanned unmanning unmans unmarked unmarried unmask unmasked unmasking unmasks unmistakable unmistakably unmitigated unmodified unmoved unnamed unnatural unnecessarily unnecessary unnerve unnerved unnerves unnerving unnoticed unobtainable unoccupied unofficial unoriginal unorthodox unpack unpacked unpacking unpacks unpaid unparalleled unpick unpleasant unpleasantly unpleasantness unpopular unpopularity unprecedented unpredictable unprepared unprincipled unprintable unprivileged unprotected unproven unprovoked unpublished unqualified unquestionable unquestionably unravel unraveled unraveling unravels unread unreadable unreal unrealistic unreasonable unreasonably unrecognized unrelated unrelenting unreliability unreliable unremarkable unrepeatable unrepresentative unreservedly unresolved unrest unrest's unrestricted unrivaled unruffled unrulier unruliest unruly unsafe unsafer unsafest unsaid unsanitary unsatisfactory unsatisfied unsavory unsay unsaying unsays unscathed unscheduled unscientific unscrew unscrewed unscrewing unscrews unscrupulous unseasonable unseat unseated unseating unseats unseemlier unseemliest unseemly unseen unset unsettle unsettled unsettles unsettling unsightlier unsightliest unsightly unsigned unskilled unsolicited unsolved unsophisticated unsound unsounder unsoundest unspeakable unspecified unstable unstructured unstuck unsubstantiated unsuccessful unsuccessfully unsuitable unsuited unsung unsupportable unsupported unsure unsuspecting untangle untangled untangles untangling untenable unthinkable untidier untidiest untidy untie untied unties until untiring unto untold untouched untrained untrue untruer untruest untrustworthy untying unusable unused unusual unusually unveil unveiled unveiling unveils unwanted unwarranted unwary unwashed unwelcome unwell unwieldier unwieldiest unwieldy unwilling unwillingness unwind unwinding unwinds unwise unwiser unwisest unwittingly unworkable unworthy unwound unwrap unwrapped unwrapping unwraps unwritten up upbeat upbeat's upbeats upbringing upbringing's upbringings update update's updated updates updating upend upended upending upends upgrade upgrade's upgraded upgrades upgrading upheaval upheaval's upheavals upheld uphill uphill's uphills uphold upholding upholds upholster upholstered upholsterer upholsterer's upholsterers upholstering upholsters upholstery upholstery's upkeep upkeep's uplift uplift's uplifted uplifting uplifts upload upon upped upper upper's uppermost uppers upping upright upright's uprights uprising uprising's uprisings uproar uproar's uproars uproot uprooted uprooting uproots ups upset upset's upsets upsetting upshot upshot's upshots upside upstairs upstanding upstart upstart's upstarted upstarting upstarts upstream uptake uptight uptown uptown's upturn upturn's upturned upturning upturns upward upwardly upwards uranium uranium's urban urbane urbaner urbanest urchin urchin's urchins urge urge's urged urgency urgency's urgent urgently urges urging urinate urinated urinates urinating urine urine's urn urn's urns us usable usage usage's usages use use's used useful usefully usefulness usefulness's useless uselessly uselessness uselessness's user user's users uses usher usher's ushered ushering ushers using usual usual's usually usurp usurped usurping usurps utensil utensil's utensils uteri uterus uterus's utilitarian utilitarianism utilities utility utility's utilization utilization's utilize utilized utilizes utilizing utmost utmost's utter utterance utterance's utterances uttered uttering utterly utters vacancies vacancy vacancy's vacant vacate vacated vacates vacating vacation vacation's vacationed vacationing vacations vaccinate vaccinated vaccinates vaccinating vaccination vaccination's vaccinations vaccine vaccine's vaccines vacillate vacillated vacillates vacillating vacuous vacuum vacuum's vacuumed vacuuming vacuums vagabond vagabond's vagabonded vagabonding vagabonds vagaries vagary vagary's vagina vagina's vaginae vaginal vagrant vagrant's vagrants vague vaguely vagueness vagueness's vaguer vaguest vain vainer vainest valentine valentine's valentines valet valet's valeted valeting valets valiant valid validate validated validates validating validation validity validity's validly valise valise's valises valley valley's valleys valor valor's valuable valuable's valuables value value's valued valueless values valuing valve valve's valved valves valving vampire vampire's vampires van van's vandal vandal's vandalism vandalism's vandalize vandalized vandalizes vandalizing vandals vane vane's vanes vanguard vanguard's vanguards vanilla vanilla's vanillas vanish vanished vanishes vanishing vanities vanity vanity's vanned vanning vanquish vanquished vanquishes vanquishing vans vapor vapor's vaporize vaporized vaporizes vaporizing vapors variable variable's variables variance variant variant's variants variation variation's variations varied varies varieties variety variety's various variously varnish varnish's varnished varnishes varnishing varsities varsity varsity's vary varying vase vase's vases vast vast's vaster vastest vastly vastness vastness's vasts vat vat's vats vatted vatting vault vault's vaulted vaulting vaults veal veal's vector vector's vectors veer veer's veered veering veers vegetable vegetable's vegetables vegetarian vegetarian's vegetarianism vegetarians vegetation vegetation's vehement vehemently vehicle vehicle's vehicles veil veil's veiled veiling veils vein vein's veined veining veins velocities velocity velocity's velour velour's velvet velvet's velvety vend vended vending vendor vendor's vendors vends veneer veneer's veneered veneering veneers venerable venerate venerated venerates venerating veneration veneration's vengeance vengeance's vengeful venison venison's venom venom's venomous vent vent's vented ventilate ventilated ventilates ventilating ventilation ventilation's ventilator ventilator's ventilators venting ventricle ventricle's ventricles ventriloquist ventriloquist's ventriloquists vents venture venture's ventured ventures venturing venue venue's venues veracity veranda veranda's verandas verb verb's verbal verbal's verbally verbals verbatim verbiage verbose verbosity verbs verdict verdict's verdicts verge verge's verged verges verging verier veriest verification verification's verified verifies verify verifying veritable vermin vermin's vernacular vernacular's vernaculars versatile versatility versatility's verse verse's versed verses versing version version's versions versus vertebra vertebra's vertebrae vertebrate vertebrate's vertebrates vertical vertical's vertically verticals vertices vertigo vertigo's verve verve's very vessel vessel's vessels vest vest's vested vestibule vestibule's vestibules vestige vestige's vestiges vesting vestment vestment's vestments vests vet vet's veteran veteran's veterans veterinarian veterinarian's veterinarians veterinaries veterinary veterinary's veto veto's vetoed vetoes vetoing vets vetted vetting vex vexation vexation's vexations vexed vexes vexing via viability viable viaduct viaduct's viaducts vial vial's vials vibrant vibrate vibrated vibrates vibrating vibration vibration's vibrations vicar vicar's vicarious vicariously vicars vice vice's viced vices vicing vicinity vicinity's vicious viciously victim victim's victimize victimized victimizes victimizing victims victor victor's victories victorious victors victory victory's video video's videos videotape videotape's videotaped videotapes videotaping vie vied vies view view's viewed viewer viewer's viewers viewing viewpoint viewpoint's viewpoints views vigil vigil's vigilance vigilance's vigilant vigilante vigilante's vigilantes vigils vigor vigor's vigorous vigorously vile viler vilest vilified vilifies vilify vilifying villa villa's village village's villager villager's villagers villages villain villain's villainies villainous villains villainy villainy's villas vindicate vindicated vindicates vindicating vindictive vine vine's vinegar vinegar's vines vineyard vineyard's vineyards vintage vintage's vintages vinyl vinyl's vinyls viola viola's violas violate violated violates violating violation violation's violations violence violence's violent violently violet violet's violets violin violin's violins viper viper's vipers viral virgin virgin's virginity virginity's virgins virile virility virility's virtual virtually virtue virtue's virtues virtuoso virtuoso's virtuous virtuously virulent virus virus's viruses visa visa's visaed visaing visas vise vise's vised vises visibility visibility's visible visibly vising vision vision's visionaries visionary visionary's visioned visioning visions visit visit's visitation visitation's visitations visited visiting visitor visitor's visitors visits visor visor's visors vista vista's vistas visual visual's visualize visualized visualizes visualizing visually visuals vital vitality vitality's vitally vitamin vitamin's vitamins vitriolic vivacious vivaciously vivacity vivacity's vivid vivider vividest vividly vivisection vivisection's vocabularies vocabulary vocabulary's vocal vocal's vocalist vocalist's vocalists vocals vocation vocation's vocational vocations vociferous vociferously vodka vodka's vogue vogue's vogues voice voice's voiced voices voicing void void's voided voiding voids volatile volcanic volcano volcano's volcanoes volition volition's volley volley's volleyball volleyball's volleyballs volleyed volleying volleys volt volt's voltage voltage's voltages volts volume volume's volumes voluminous voluntaries voluntarily voluntary voluntary's volunteer volunteer's volunteered volunteering volunteers voluptuous vomit vomit's vomited vomiting vomits voodoo voodoo's voodooed voodooing voodoos voracious vortex vortex's vortexes vote vote's voted voter voter's voters votes voting vouch vouched voucher voucher's vouchers vouches vouching vow vow's vowed vowel vowel's vowels vowing vows voyage voyage's voyaged voyager voyager's voyagers voyages voyaging vulgar vulgarer vulgarest vulgarities vulgarity vulgarity's vulnerabilities vulnerability vulnerability's vulnerable vulture vulture's vultures vying wad wad's wadded wadding waddle waddle's waddled waddles waddling wade wade's waded wades wading wads wafer wafer's wafers waffle waffle's waffled waffles waffling waft waft's wafted wafting wafts wag wag's wage wage's waged wager wager's wagered wagering wagers wages wagged wagging waging wagon wagon's wagons wags waif waif's waifs wail wail's wailed wailing wails waist waist's waistline waistline's waistlines waists wait wait's waited waiter waiter's waiters waiting waitress waitress's waitresses waits waive waived waiver waiver's waivers waives waiving wake wake's waked waken wakened wakening wakens wakes waking walk walk's walked walker walker's walkers walking walkout walkout's walkouts walks wall wall's walled wallet wallet's wallets walling wallop wallop's walloped walloping wallops wallow wallow's wallowed wallowing wallows wallpaper wallpaper's wallpapered wallpapering wallpapers walls walnut walnut's walnuts walrus walrus's walruses waltz waltz's waltzed waltzes waltzing wan wand wand's wander wandered wanderer wanderer's wanderers wandering wanders wands wane wane's waned wanes waning wanna wanner wannest want want's wanted wanting wanton wanton's wantoned wantoning wantons wants war war's warble warble's warbled warbles warbling ward ward's warded warden warden's wardens warding wardrobe wardrobe's wardrobes wards warehouse warehouse's warehoused warehouses warehousing warfare warfare's warhead warhead's warheads warier wariest warlike warm warmed warmer warmest warming warmly warms warmth warmth's warn warned warning warning's warnings warns warp warp's warpath warpath's warpaths warped warping warps warrant warrant's warranted warrantied warranties warranting warrants warranty warranty's warrantying warred warren warren's warrens warring warrior warrior's warriors wars wart wart's wartime warts wary was wash wash's washable washable's washables washcloth washcloth's washcloths washed washer washer's washers washes washing washing's washout washout's washouts washroom washroom's washrooms wasn't wasp wasp's wasps wastage waste waste's wastebasket wastebasket's wastebaskets wasted wasteful wastefully wasteland wasteland's wastelands wastes wasting watch watch's watchdog watchdog's watchdogs watched watches watchful watching watchman watchman's watchmen watchword watchword's watchwords water water's watercolor watercolor's watercolors watered waterfall waterfall's waterfalls waterfront waterfront's waterfronts waterier wateriest watering waterlogged watermark watermark's watermarked watermarking watermarks watermelon watermelon's watermelons waterproof waterproof's waterproofed waterproofing waterproofs waters watershed watershed's watersheds watertight waterway waterway's waterways waterworks waterworks's watery watt watt's watts wave wave's waved waveform wavelength wavelength's wavelengths waver waver's wavered wavering wavers waves wavier waviest waving wavy wax wax's waxed waxes waxier waxiest waxing waxy way way's waylaid waylay waylaying waylays ways wayside wayside's waysides wayward we we're weak weaken weakened weakening weakens weaker weakest weakling weakling's weaklings weakly weakness weakness's weaknesses wealth wealth's wealthier wealthiest wealthy wean weaned weaning weans weapon weapon's weaponry weapons wear wear's wearied wearier wearies weariest wearily weariness weariness's wearing wearisome wears weary wearying weasel weasel's weaseled weaseling weasels weather weather's weathered weathering weathers weave weave's weaved weaver weaver's weavers weaves weaving web web's webbed webbing webs wed wedded wedder wedding wedding's weddings wedge wedge's wedged wedges wedging wedlock wedlock's weds wee wee's weed weed's weeded weedier weediest weeding weeds weedy weeing week week's weekday weekday's weekdays weekend weekend's weekended weekending weekends weeklies weekly weekly's weeks weep weep's weeping weeps weer wees weest weigh weigh's weighed weighing weighs weight weight's weighted weightier weightiest weighting weights weighty weird weirder weirdest weirdness weirdo weirdo's weirdos welcome welcome's welcomed welcomes welcoming weld weld's welded welder welder's welders welding welds welfare welfare's well well's welled welling wellington wells welt welt's welted welter welter's weltered weltering welters welting welts went wept were werewolf werewolf's werewolves west west's westerlies westerly westerly's western western's westerns westward wet wet's wets wetter wettest wetting whack whack's whacked whacking whacks whale whale's whaled whaler whaler's whalers whales whaling wharf wharf's wharves what what's whatever whats whatsoever wheat wheat's wheedle wheedled wheedles wheedling wheel wheel's wheelbarrow 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6. 63532-0.txt - Project Gutenberg
May 5, 2023 · My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard ...
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Within a Budding Grove Author: Marcel Proust Translator: Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff Release Date: October 23, 2020 [EBook #63532] [Most recently updated: May 5, 2023] Language: English Produced by: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE *** WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE by MARCEL PROUST TRANSLATED BY C. K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF THE MODERN LIBRARY PUBLISHERS: NEW YORK _Copyright_, 1924, _By_ THOMAS SELTZER TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION _To_ K. S. S. That _men in armour may be born With serpents' teeth the field is sown; Rains mould, winds bend, suns gild the corn Too quickly ripe, too early mown._ _I scan the quivering beads, behold The features, catch the whispered breath Of friends long garnered in the cold Unopening granaries of death_, _Whose names in solemn cadence ring Across my slow oblivious page. Their friendship was a finer thing Than fame, or wealth, or honoured age._ _And--while you live and I--shall last Its tale of seasons with us yet Who cherish, in the undying The men we never can forget._ Bad Kissingen, C. K. S. M. July 31, 1923. CONTENTS PART I Madame Swann at Home _A break in the narrative: old friends in new aspects--The Marquis de Norpois--Bergotte--How I cease for the time being to see Gilberte: a general outline of the sorrow caused by a parting and of the irregular process of oblivion._ Place-Names: The Place _My first visit to Balbec_ PART II Place-Names: The Place (continued) _First impressions of M. de Charlus and of Robert de Saint-Loup--Dinner with Bloch and his family._ Seascape, with Frieze of Girls _Dinners at Rivebelle--Enter Albertine._ WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE PART I _MADAME SWANN AT HOME_ My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home, and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the old Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone that he knew, however slightly, was an impossible vulgarian whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as--to use his own epithet--a "pestilent" fellow. Now, this attitude on my father's part may be felt to require a few words of explanation, inasmuch as some of us, no doubt, remember a Cottard of distinct mediocrity and a Swann by whom modesty and discretion, in all his social relations, were carried to the utmost refinement of delicacy. But in his case, what had happened was that, to the original "young Swann" and also to the Swann of the Jockey Club, our old friend had added a fresh personality (which was not to be his last) that of Odette's husband. Adapting to the humble ambitions of that lady the instinct, the desire, the industry which he had always had, he had laboriously constructed for himself, a long way beneath the old, a new position more appropriate to the companion who was to share it with him. In this he shewed himself another man. Since (while he continued to go, by himself, to the houses of his own friends, on whom he did not care to inflict Odette unless they had expressly asked that she should be introduced to them) it was a new life that he had begun to lead, in common with his wife, among a new set of people, it was quite intelligible that, in order to estimate the importance of these new friends and thereby the pleasure, the self-esteem that were to be derived from entertaining them, he should have made use, as a standard of comparison, not of the brilliant society in which he himself had moved before his marriage but of the earlier environment of Odette. And yet, even when one knew that it was with unfashionable officials and their faded wives, the wallflowers of ministerial ball-rooms, that he was now anxious to associate, it was still astonishing to hear him, who in the old days, and even still, would so gracefully refrain from mentioning an invitation to Twickenham or to Marlborough House, proclaim with quite unnecessary emphasis that the wife of some Assistant Under-Secretary for Something had returned Mme. Swann's call. It will perhaps be objected here that what this really implied was that the simplicity of the fashionable Swann had been nothing more than a supreme refinement of vanity, and that, like certain other Israelites, my parents' old friend had contrived to illustrate in turn all the stages through which his race had passed, from the crudest and coarsest form of snobbishness up to the highest pitch of good manners. But the chief reason--and one which is applicable to humanity as a whole--was that our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our duty to practise them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those very same virtues into play. Swann, in his intense consciousness of his new social surroundings, and in the pride with which he referred to them, was like those great artists--modest or generous by nature--who, if at the end of their career they take to cooking or to gardening, display a childlike gratification at the compliments that are paid to their dishes or their borders, and will not listen to any of the criticism which they heard unmoved when it was applied to their real achievements; or who, after giving away a canvas, cannot conceal their annoyance if they lose a couple of francs at dominoes. As for Professor Cottard, we shall meet him again and can study him at our leisure, much later in the course of our story, with the "Mistress", Mme. Verdurin, in her country house La Raspelière. For the present, the following observations must suffice; first of all, in the case of Swann the alteration might indeed be surprising, since it had been accomplished and yet was not suspected by me when I used to see Gilberte's father in the Champs-Elysées, where, moreover, as he never spoke to me, he could not very well have made any display of his political relations. It is true that, if he had done so, I might not at once have discerned his vanity, for the idea that one has long held of a person is apt to stop one's eyes and ears; my mother, for three whole years, had no more noticed the salve with which one of her nieces used to paint her lips than if it had been wholly and invisibly dissolved in some clear liquid; until one day a streak too much, or possibly something else, brought about the phenomenon known as super-saturation; all the paint that had hitherto passed unperceived was now crystallised, and my mother, in the face of this sudden riot of colour, declared, in the best Combray manner, that it was a perfect scandal, and almost severed relations with her niece. With Cottard, on the contrary, the epoch in which we have seen him assisting at the first introduction of Swann to the Verdurins was now buried in the past; whereas honours, offices and titles come with the passage of years; moreover, a man may be illiterate, and make stupid puns, and yet have a special gift, which no amount of general culture can replace--such as the gift of a great strategist or physician. And so it was not merely as an obscure practitioner, who had attained in course of time to European celebrity, that the rest of his profession regarded Cottard. The most intelligent of the younger doctors used to assert--for a year or two, that is to say, for fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also--that if they themselves ever fell ill Cottard was the only one of the leading men to whom they would entrust their lives. No doubt they preferred, socially, to meet certain others who were better read, more artistic, with whom they could discuss Nietzsche and Wagner. When there was a musical party at Mme. Cottard's, on the evenings when she entertained--in the hope that it might one day make him Dean of the Faculty--the colleagues and pupils of her husband, he, instead of listening, preferred to play cards in another room. Yet everybody praised the quickness, the penetration, the unerring confidence with which, at a glance, he could diagnose disease. Thirdly, in considering the general impression which Professor Cottard must have made on a man like my father, we must bear in mind that the character which a man exhibits in the latter half of his life is not always, even if it is often his original character developed or withered, attenuated or enlarged; it is sometimes the exact opposite, like a garment that has been turned. Except from the Verdurins, who were infatuated with him, Cottard's hesitating manner, his excessive timidity and affability had, in his young days, called down upon him endless taunts and sneers. What charitable friend counselled that glacial air? The importance of his professional standing made it all the more easy to adopt. Wherever he went, save at the Verdurins', where he instinctively became himself again, he would assume a repellent coldness, remain silent as long as possible, be peremptory when he was obliged to speak, and not forget to say the most cutting things. He had every opportunity of rehearsing this new attitude before his patients, who, seeing him for the first time, were not in a position to make comparisons, and would have been greatly surprised to learn that he was not at all a rude man by nature. Complete impassivity was what he strove to attain, and even while visiting his hospital wards, when he allowed himself to utter one of those puns which left everyone, from the house physician to the junior student, helpless with laughter, he would always make it without moving a muscle of his face, while even that was no longer recognisable now that he had shaved off his beard and moustache. But who, the reader has been asking, was the Marquis de Norpois. Well, he had been Minister Plenipotentiary before the War, and was actually an Ambassador on the Sixteenth of May; in spite of which, and to the general astonishment, he had since been several times chosen to represent France on Extraordinary Missions,--even as Controller of the Public Debt in Egypt, where, thanks to his great capability as a financier, he had rendered important services--by Radical Cabinets under which a reactionary of the middle classes would have declined to serve, and in whose eyes M. de Norpois, in view of his past, his connexions and his opinions, ought presumably to have been suspect. But these advanced Ministers seemed to consider that, in making such an appointment, they were shewing how broad their own minds were, when the supreme interests of France were at stake, were raising themselves above the general run of politicians, were meriting, from the _Journal des Débats_ itself, the title of "Statesmen", and were reaping direct advantage from the weight that attaches to an aristocratic name and the dramatic interest always aroused by an unexpected appointment. And they knew also that they could reap these advantages by making an appeal to M. de Norpois, without having to fear any want of political loyalty on his part, a fault against which his noble birth not only need not put them on their guard but offered a positive guarantee. And in this calculation the Government of the Republic were not mistaken. In the first place, because an aristocrat of a certain type, brought up from his cradle to regard his name as an integral part of himself of which no accident can deprive him (an asset of whose value his peers, or persons of even higher rank, can form a fairly exact estimate), knows that he can dispense with the efforts (since they can in no way enhance his position) in which, without any appreciable result, so many public men of the middle class spend themselves,--to profess only the "right" opinions, to frequent only the "sound" people. Anxious, on the other hand, to increase his own importance in the eyes of the princely or ducal families which take immediate precedence of his own, he knows that he can do so by giving his name that complement which hitherto it has lacked, which will give it priority over other names heraldically its equals: such as political power, a literary or an artistic reputation, or a large fortune. And so what he saves by avoiding the society of the ineffective country squires, after whom all the professional families run helter-skelter, but of his intimacy with whom, were he to profess it, a prince would think nothing, he will lavish on the politicians who (free-masons, or worse, though they be) can advance him in Diplomacy or "back" him in an election, and on the artists or scientists whose patronage can help him to "arrive" in those departments in which they excel, on everyone, in fact, who is in a position to confer a fresh distinction or to "bring off" a rich marriage. But in the character of M. de Norpois there was this predominant feature, that, in the course of a long career of diplomacy, he had become imbued with that negative, methodical, conservative spirit, called "governmental", which is common to all Governments and, under every Government, particularly inspires its Foreign Office. He had imbibed, during that career, an aversion, a dread, a contempt for the methods of procedure, more or less revolutionary and in any event quite incorrect, which are those of an Opposition. Save in the case of a few illiterates--high or low, it makes no matter--by whom no difference in quality is perceptible, what attracts men one to another is not a common point of view but a consanguinity of spirit. An Academician of the kind of Legouvé, and therefore an upholder of the classics, would applaud Maxime Ducamp's or Mezière's eulogy of Victor Hugo with more fervour than that of Boileau by Claudel. A common Nationalism suffices to endear Barrès to his electors, who scarcely distinguish between him and M. Georges Berry, but does not endear him to those of his brother Academicians who, with a similar outlook on politics but a different type of mind, will prefer to him even such open adversaries as M. Ribot and M. Deschanel, with whom, in turn, the most loyal Monarchists feel themselves more closely allied than with Maurras or Léon Daudet, although these also are living in the hope of a glorious Restoration. Miserly in the use of words, not only from a professional scruple of prudence and reserve, but because words themselves have more value, present more subtleties of definition to men whose efforts, protracted over a decade, to bring two countries to an understanding, are condensed, translated--in a speech or in a protocol--into a single adjective, colourless in all appearance, but to them pregnant with a world of meaning, M. de Norpois was considered very stiff, at the Commission, where he sat next to my father, whom everyone else congratulated on the astonishing way in which the old Ambassador unbent to him. My father was himself more astonished than anyone. For not being, as a rule, very affable, his company was little sought outside his own intimate circle, a limitation which he used modestly and frankly to avow. He realised that these overtures were an outcome, in the diplomat, of that point of view which everyone adopts for himself in making his choice of friends, from which all a man's intellectual qualities, his refinement, his affection are a far less potent recommendation of him, when at the same time he bores or irritates one, than are the mere straightforwardness and good-humour of another man whom most people would regard as frivolous or even fatuous. "De Norpois has asked me to dinner again; it's quite extraordinary; everyone on the Commission is amazed, as he never has any personal relations with any of us. I am sure he's going to tell me something thrilling, again, about the 'Seventy war." My father knew that M. de Norpois had warned, had perhaps been alone in warning the Emperor of the growing strength and bellicose designs of Prussia, and that Bismarck rated his intelligence most highly. Only the other day, at the Opera, during the gala performance given for King Theodosius, the newspapers had all drawn attention to the long conversation which that Monarch had held with M. de Norpois. "I must ask him whether the King's visit had any real significance," my father went on, for he was keenly interested in foreign politics. "I know old Norpois keeps very close as a rule, but when he's with me he opens out quite charmingly." As for my mother, perhaps the Ambassador had not the type of mind towards which she felt herself most attracted. I should add that his conversation furnished so exhaustive a glossary of the superannuated forms of speech peculiar to a certain profession, class and period--a period which, for that profession and that class, might be said not to have altogether passed away--that I sometimes regret that I have not kept any literal record simply of the things that I have heard him say. I should thus have obtained an effect of old-fashioned courtesy by the same process and at as little expense as that actor at the Palais-Royal who, when asked where on earth he managed to find his astounding hats, answered, "I do not find my hats. I keep them." In a word, I suppose that my mother considered M. de Norpois a trifle "out-of-date", which was by no means a fault in her eyes, so far as manners were concerned, but attracted her less in the region--not, in this instance, of ideas, for those of M. de Norpois were extremely modern--but of idiom. She felt, however, that she was paying a delicate compliment to her husband when she spoke admiringly of the diplomat who had shewn so remarkable a predilection for him. By confirming in my father's mind the good opinion that he already had of M. de Norpois, and so inducing him to form a good opinion of himself also, she knew that she was carrying out that one of her wifely duties which consisted in making life pleasant and comfortable for her husband, just as when she saw to it that his dinner was perfectly cooked and served in silence. And as she was incapable of deceiving my father, she compelled herself to admire the old Ambassador, so as to be able to praise him with sincerity. Incidentally she could naturally, and did appreciate his kindness, his somewhat antiquated courtesy (so ceremonious that when, as he was walking along the street, his tall figure rigidly erect, he caught sight of my mother driving past, before raising his hat to her he would fling away the cigar that he had just lighted); his conversation, so elaborately circumspect, in which he referred as seldom as possible to himself and always considered what might interest the person to whom he was speaking; his promptness in answering a letter, which was so astonishing that whenever my father, just after posting one himself to M. de Norpois, saw his handwriting upon an envelope, his first thought was always one of annoyance that their letters must, unfortunately, have crossed in the post; which, one was led to suppose, bestowed upon him the special and luxurious privilege of extraordinary deliveries and collections at all hours of the day and night. My mother marvelled at his being so punctilious although so busy, so friendly although so much in demand, never realising that "although", with such people, is invariably an unrecognised "because", and that (just as old men are always wonderful for their age, and kings extraordinarily simple, and country cousins astonishingly well-informed) it was the same system of habits that enabled M. de Norpois to undertake so many duties and to be so methodical in answering letters, to go everywhere and to be so friendly when he came to us. Moreover she made the mistake which everyone makes who is unduly modest; she rated everything that concerned herself below, and consequently outside the range of other people's duties and engagements. The letter which it seemed to her so meritorious in my father's friend to have written us promptly, since in the course of the day he must have had ever so many letters to write, she excepted from that great number of letters, of which actually it was a unit; in the same way she did not consider that dining with us was, for M. de Norpois, merely one of the innumerable activities of his social life; she never guessed that the Ambassador had trained himself, long ago, to look upon dining out as one of his diplomatic functions, and to display, at table, an inveterate charm which it would have been too much to have expected him specially to discard when he came to dine with us. The evening on which M. de Norpois first appeared at our table, in a year when I still went to play in the Champs-Elysées, has remained fixed in my memory because the afternoon of the same day was that upon which I at last went to hear Berma, at a _matinée_, in _Phèdre_, and also because in talking to M. de Norpois I realised suddenly, and in a new and different way, how completely the feelings aroused in me by all that concerned Gilberte Swann and her parents differed from any that the same family could inspire in anyone else. It was no doubt the sight of the depression in which I was plunged by the approach of the New Year holidays, in which, as she herself had informed me, I was to see nothing of Gilberte, that prompted my mother one day, in the hope of distracting my mind, to suggest, "If you are still so anxious to hear Berma, I think that your father would allow you perhaps to go; your grandmother can take you." But it was because M. de Norpois had told him that he ought to let me hear Berma, that it was an experience for a young man to remember in later life, that my father, who had hitherto been so resolutely opposed to my going and wasting my time, with the added risk of my falling ill again, on what he used to shock my grandmother by calling "futilities", was now not far from regarding this manner of spending an afternoon as included, in some vague way, in the list of precious formulae for success in a brilliant career. My grandmother, who, in renouncing on my behalf the profit which, according to her, I should have derived from hearing Berma, had made a considerable sacrifice in the interests of my health, was surprised to find that this last had become of no account at a mere word from M. de Norpois. Reposing the unconquerable hopes of her rationalist spirit in the strict course of fresh air and early hours which had been prescribed for me, she now deplored, as something disastrous, this infringement that I was to make of my rules, and in a tone of despair protested, "How easily led you are!" to my father, who replied angrily "What! So it's you that are for not letting him go, now. That is really too much, after your telling us all day and every day that it would be so good for him." M. de Norpois had also brought about a change in my father's plans in a matter of far greater importance to myself. My father had always meant me to become a diplomat, and I could not endure the thought that, even if I did have to stay for some years, first, at the Ministry, I should run the risk of being sent, later on, as Ambassador, to capitals in which no Gilberte dwelt. I should have preferred to return to the literary career that I had planned for myself, and had then abandoned, years before, in my wanderings along the Guermantes way. But my father had steadily opposed my devoting myself to literature, which he regarded as vastly inferior to diplomacy, refusing even to dignify it with the title of career, until the day when M. de Norpois, who had little love for the more recent generations of diplomatic agents, assured him that it was quite possible, by writing, to attract as much attention, to receive as much consideration, to exercise as much influence, and at the same time to preserve more independence than in the Embassies. "Well, well, I should never have believed it. Old Norpois doesn't at all disapprove of your idea of taking up writing," my father had reported. And as he had a certain amount of influence himself, he imagined that there was nothing that could not be "arranged", no problem for which a happy solution might not be found in the conversation of people who "counted". "I shall bring him back to dinner, one of these days, from the Commission. You must talk to him a little, and let him see what he thinks of you. Write something good that you can shew him; he is an intimate friend of the editor of the _Deux-Mondes_; he will get you in there; he will arrange it all, the cunning old fox; and, upon my soul, he seems to think that diplomacy, nowadays----!" My happiness in the prospect of not being separated from Gilberte made me desirous, but not capable, of writing something good which could be shewn to M. de Norpois. After a few laboured pages, weariness made the pen drop from my fingers; I cried with anger at the thought that I should never have any talent, that I was not "gifted", that I could not even take advantage of the chance that M. de Norpois's coming visit was to offer me of spending the rest of my life in Paris. The recollection that I was to be taken to hear Berma alone distracted me from my grief. But just as I did not wish to see any storms except on those coasts where they raged with most violence, so I should not have cared to hear the great actress except in one of those classic parts in which Swann had told me that she touched the sublime. For when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have certain scruples about allowing our soul to gather, instead of these, other, inferior, impressions, which are liable to make us form a false estimate of the value of Beauty. Berma in _Andromaque_, in _Les Caprices de Marianne_, in _Phèdre_, was one of those famous spectacles which my imagination had so long desired. I should enjoy the same rapture as on the day when in a gondola I glided to the foot of the Titian of the Frari or the Carpaccios of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni, were I ever to hear Berma repeat the lines beginning, "On dit qu'un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous, Seigneur,----" I was familiar with them from the simple reproduction in black and white which was given of them upon the printed page; but my heart beat furiously at the thought--as of the realisation of a long-planned voyage--that I should at length behold them, bathed and brought to life in the atmosphere and sunshine of the voice of gold. A Carpaccio in Venice, Berma in _Phèdre_, masterpieces of pictorial or dramatic art which the glamour, the dignity attaching to them made so living to me, that is to say so indivisible, that if I had been taken to see Carpaccios in one of the galleries of the Louvre, or Berma in some piece of which I had never heard, I should not have experienced the same delicious amazement at finding myself at length, with wide-open eyes, before the unique and inconceivable object of so many thousand dreams. Then, while I waited, expecting to derive from Berma's playing the revelation of certain aspects of nobility and tragic grief, it seemed to me that whatever greatness, whatever truth there might be in her playing must be enhanced if the actress imposed it upon a work of real value, instead of what would, after all, be but embroidering a pattern of truth and beauty upon a common-place and vulgar web. Finally, if I went to hear Berma in a new piece, it would not be easy for me to judge of her art, of her diction, since I should not be able to differentiate between a text which was not already familiar and what she added to it by her intonations and gestures, an addition which would seem to me to be embodied in the play itself; whereas the old plays, the classics which I knew by heart, presented themselves to me as vast and empty walls, reserved and made ready for my inspection, on which I should be able to appreciate without restriction the devices by which Berma would cover them, as with frescoes, with the perpetually fresh treasures of her inspiration. Unfortunately, for some years now, since she had retired from the great theatres, to make the fortune of one on the boulevards where she was the "star", she had ceased to appear in classic parts; and in vain did I scan the hoardings; they never advertised any but the newest pieces, written specially for her by authors in fashion at the moment. When, one morning, as I stood searching the column of announcements to find the afternoon performances for the week of the New Year holidays, I saw there for the first time--at the foot of the bill, after some probably insignificant curtain-raiser, whose title was opaque to me because it had latent in it all the details of an action of which I was ignorant--two acts of _Phèdre_ with Mme. Berma, and, on the following afternoons, _Le Demi-Monde, Les Caprices de Marianne_, names which, like that of _Phèdre_, were for me transparent, filled with light only, so familiar were those works to me, illuminated to their very depths by the revealing smile of art. They seemed to me to invest with a fresh nobility Mme. Berma herself when I read in the newspapers, after the programme of these performances, that it was she who had decided to shew herself once more to the public in some of her early creations. She was conscious, then, that certain stage-parts have an interest which survives the novelty of their first production or the success of a revival; she regarded them, when interpreted by herself, as museum pieces which it might be instructive to set before the eyes of the generation which had admired her in them long ago, or of that which had never yet seen her in them. In thus advertising, in the middle of a column of plays intended only to while away an evening, this _Phèdre_, a title no longer than any of the rest, nor set in different type, she added something indescribable, as though a hostess, introducing you, before you all go in to dinner, to her other guests, were to mention, casually, amid the string of names which are the names of guests and nothing more, and without any change of tone:--"M. Anatole France." The doctor who was attending me--the same who had forbidden me to travel--advised my parents not to let me go to the theatre; I should only be ill again afterwards, perhaps for weeks, and should in the long run derive more pain than pleasure from the experience. The fear of this might have availed to stop me, if what I had anticipated from such a spectacle had been only a pleasure for which a subsequent pain could so compensate as to cancel it. But what I demanded from this performance--just as from the visit to Balbec, the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed--was something quite different from pleasure; a series of verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me again by any of the trivial incidents--even though it were the cause of bodily suffering--of my otiose existence. At best, the pleasure which I was to feel during the performance appeared to me as the perhaps inevitable form of the perception of these truths; and I hoped only that the illness which had been forecast for me would not begin until the play was finished, so that my pleasure should not be in any way compromised or spoiled. I implored my parents, who, after the doctor's visit, were no longer inclined to let me go to _Phèdre._ I repeated, all day long, to myself, the speech beginning, "On dit qu'un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous,----" seeking out every intonation that could be put into it, so as to be able better to measure my surprise at the way which Berma would have found of uttering the lines. Concealed, like the Holy of Holies, beneath the veil that screened her from my gaze, behind which I invested her, every moment, with a fresh aspect, according to which of the words of Bergotte--in the pamphlet that Gilberte had found for me--was passing through my mind; "plastic nobility", "Christian austerity" or "Jansenist pallor", "Princess of Troezen and of Cleves" or "Mycenean drama", "Delphic symbol", "Solar myth"; that divine Beauty, whom Berma's acting was to reveal to me, night and day, upon an altar perpetually illumined, sat enthroned in the sanctuary of my mind, my mind for which not itself but my stern, my fickle parents were to decide whether or not it was to enshrine, and for all time, the perfections of the Deity unveiled, in the same spot where was now her invisible form. And with my eyes fixed upon that inconceivable image, I strove from morning to night to overcome the barriers which my family were putting in my way. But when those had at last fallen, when my mother--albeit this _matinée_ was actually to coincide with the meeting of the Commission from which my father had promised to bring M. de Norpois home to dinner--had said to me, "Very well, we don't wish you to be unhappy;--if you think that you will enjoy it so very much, you must go; that's all;" when this day of theatre-going, hitherto forbidden and unattainable, depended now only upon myself, then for the first time, being no longer troubled by the wish that it might cease to be impossible, I asked myself if it were desirable, if there were not other reasons than my parents' prohibition which should make me abandon my design. In the first place, whereas I had been detesting them for their cruelty, their consent made them now so dear to me that the thought of causing them pain stabbed me also with a pain through which the purpose of life shewed itself as the pursuit not of truth but of loving-kindness, and life itself seemed good or evil only as my parents were happy or sad. "I would rather not go, if it hurts you," I told my mother, who, on the contrary, strove hard to expel from my mind any lurking fear that she might regret my going, since that, she said, would spoil the pleasure that I should otherwise derive from _Phèdre_, and it was the thought of my pleasure that had induced my father and her to reverse their earlier decision. But then this sort of obligation to find a pleasure in the performance seemed to me very burdensome. Besides, if I returned home ill, should I be well again in time to be able to go to the Champs-Elysées as soon as the holidays were over and Gilberte returned? Against all these arguments I set, so as to decide which course I should take, the idea, invisible there behind its veil, of the perfections of Berma. I cast into one pan of the scales "Making Mamma unhappy", "risking not being able to go on the Champs-Elysées", and into the other, "Jansenist pallor", "Solar myth", until the words themselves grew dark and clouded in my mind's vision, ceased to say anything to me, lost all their force; and gradually my hesitations became so painful that if I had now decided upon the theatre it would have been only that I might bring them to an end, and be delivered from them once and for all. It would have been to fix a term to my sufferings, and no longer in the expectation of an intellectual benediction, yielding to the attractions of perfection, that I would let myself be taken, not now to the Wise Goddess, but to the stem, implacable Divinity, featureless and unnamed, who had been secretly substituted for her behind the veil. But suddenly everything was altered. My desire to go and hear Berma received a fresh stimulus which enabled me to await the coming of the _matinée_ with impatience and with joy; having gone to take up, in front of the column on which the playbills were, my daily station, as excruciating, of late, as that of a stylite saint, I had seen there, still moist and wrinkled, the complete bill of _Phèdre_, which had just been pasted up for the first time (and on which, I must confess, the rest of the cast furnished no additional attraction which could help me to decide). But it gave to one of the points between which my indecision wavered a form at once more concrete and--inasmuch as the bill was dated not from the day on which I read it but from that on which the performance would take place, and from the very hour at which the curtain would rise--almost imminent, well on the way, already, to its realisation, so that I jumped for joy before the column at the thought that on that day, and at that hour precisely, I should be sitting there in my place, ready to hear the voice of Berma; and for fear lest my parents might not now be in time to secure two good seats for my grandmother and myself, I raced back to the house, whipped on by the magic words which had now taken the place, in my mind, of "Jansenist pallor" and "Solar myth";--"Ladies will not be admitted to the stalls in hats. The doors will be closed at two o'clock." Alas! that first _matinée_ was to prove a bitter disappointment. My father offered to drop my grandmother and me at the theatre, on his way to the Commission. Before leaving the house he said to my mother: "See that you have a good dinner for us to-night; you remember, I'm bringing de Norpois back with me." My mother had not forgotten. And all that day, and overnight, Françoise, rejoicing in the opportunity to devote herself to that art of the kitchen,--of which she was indeed a past-master, stimulated, moreover, by the prospect of having a new guest to feed, the consciousness that she would have to compose, by methods known to her alone, a dish of beef in jelly, had been living in the effervescence of creation; since she attached the utmost importance to the intrinsic quality of the materials which were to enter into the fabric of her work, she had gone herself to the Halles to procure the best cuts of rump-steak, shin of beef, calves'-feet, as Michelangelo passed eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Julius II.--Françoise expended on these comings and goings so much ardour that Mamma, at the sight of her flaming cheeks, was alarmed lest our old servant should make herself ill with overwork, like the sculptor of the Tombs of the Medici in the quarries of Pietrasanta. And overnight Françoise had sent to be cooked in the baker's oven, shielded with breadcrumbs, like a block of pink marble packed in sawdust, what she called a "Nev'-York ham". Believing the language to be less rich than it actually was in words, and her own ears less trustworthy, the first time that she heard anyone mention York ham she had thought, no doubt,--feeling it to be hardly conceivable that the dictionary could be so prodigal as to include at once a "York" and a "New York"--that she had misheard what was said, and that the ham was really called by the name already familiar to her. And so, ever since, the word York was preceded in her ears, or before her eyes when she read it in an advertisement, by the affix "New" which she pronounced "Nev'". And it was with the most perfect faith that she would say to her kitchen-maid: "Go and fetch me a ham from Olida's. Madame told me especially to get a Nev'-York." On that particular day, if Françoise was consumed by the burning certainty of creative genius, my lot was the cruel anxiety of the seeker after truth. No doubt, so long as I had not yet heard Berma speak, I still felt some pleasure. I felt it in the little square that lay in front of the theatre, in which, in two hours' time, the bare boughs of the chestnut trees would gleam with a metallic lustre as the lighted gas-lamps shewed up every detail of their structure; before the attendants in the box-office, the selection of whom, their promotion, all their destiny depended upon the great artist--for she alone held power in the theatre, where ephemeral managers followed one after the other in an obscure succession--who took our tickets without even glancing at us, so preoccupied were they with their anxiety lest any of Mme. Berma's instructions had not been duly transmitted to the new members of the staff, lest it was not clearly, everywhere, understood that the hired applause must never sound for her, that the windows must all be kept open so long as she was not on the stage, and every door closed tight, the moment that she appeared; that a bowl of hot water must be concealed somewhere close to her, to make the dust settle: and, for that matter, at any moment now her carriage, drawn by a pair of horses with flowing manes, would be stopping outside the theatre, she would alight from it muffled in furs, and, crossly acknowledging everyone's salute, would send one of her attendants to find out whether a stage box had been kept for her friends, what the temperature was "in front", who were in the other boxes, if the programme sellers were looking smart; theatre and public being to her no more than a second, an outermost cloak which she would put on, and the medium, the more or less "good" conductor through which her talent would have to pass. I was happy, too, in the theatre itself; since I had made the discovery that--in contradiction of the picture so long entertained by my childish imagination--there was but one stage for everybody, I had supposed that I should be prevented from seeing it properly by the presence of the other spectators, as one is when in the thick of a crowd; now I registered the fact that, on the contrary, thanks to an arrangement which is, so to speak, symbolical of all spectatorship, everyone feels himself to be the centre of the theatre; which explained to me why, when Françoise had been sent once to see some melodrama from the top gallery, she had assured us on her return that her seat had been the best in the house, and that instead of finding herself too far from the stage she had been positively frightened by the mysterious and living proximity of the curtain. My pleasure increased further when I began to distinguish behind the said lowered curtain such confused rappings as one hears through the shell of an egg before the chicken emerges, sounds which speedily grew louder and suddenly, from that world which, impenetrable by our eyes, yet scrutinised us with its own, addressed themselves, and to us indubitably, in the imperious form of three consecutive hammer-blows as moving as any signals from the planet Mars. And--once this curtain had risen,--when on the stage a writing-table and a fireplace, in no way out of the ordinary, had indicated that the persons who were about to enter would be, not actors come to recite, as I had seen them once and heard them at an evening party, but real people, just living their lives at home, on whom I was thus able to spy without their seeing me--my pleasure still endured; it was broken by a momentary uneasiness; just as I was straining my ears in readiness before the piece began, two men entered the theatre from the side of the stage, who must have been very angry with each other, for they were talking so loud that in the auditorium, where there were at least a thousand people, we could hear every word, whereas in quite a small _café_ one is obliged to call the waiter and ask what it is that two men, who appear to be quarrelling, are saying; but at that moment, while I sat astonished to find that the audience was listening to them without protest, drowned as it was in a universal silence upon which broke, presently, a laugh here and there, I understood that these insolent fellows were the actors, and that the short piece known as the "curtain-raiser" had now begun. It was followed by an interval so long that the audience, who had returned to their places, grew impatient and began to stamp their feet. I was terrified at this; for just as in the report of a criminal trial, when I read that some noble-minded person was coming, against his own interests, to testify on behalf of an innocent prisoner, I was always afraid that they would not be nice enough to him, would not shew enough gratitude, would not recompense him lavishly, and that he, in disgust, would then range himself on the side of injustice; so now attributing to genius, in this respect, the same qualities as to virtue, I was afraid lest Berma, annoyed by the bad behaviour of so ill-bred an audience--in which, on the other hand, I should have liked her to recognise, with satisfaction, a few celebrities to whose judgment she would be bound to attach importance--should express her discontent and disdain by acting badly. And I gazed appealingly round me at these stamping brutes who were about to shatter, in their insensate rage, the rare and fragile impression which I had come to seek. The last moments of my pleasure were during the opening scenes of _Phèdre._ The heroine herself does not appear in these first scenes of the second act; and yet, as soon as the curtain rose, and another curtain, of red velvet this time, was parted in the middle (a curtain which was used to halve the depth of the stage in all the plays in which the "star" appeared), an actress entered from the back who had the face and voice which, I had been told, were those of Berma. The cast must therefore have been changed; all the trouble that I had taken in studying the part of the wife of Theseus was wasted. But a second actress now responded to the first. I must, then, have been mistaken in supposing that the first was Berma, for the second even more closely resembled her, and, more than the other, had her diction. Both of them, moreover, enriched their parts with noble gestures--which I could vividly distinguish, and could appreciate in their relation to the text, while they raised and let fall the lovely folds of their tunics--and also with skilful changes of tone, now passionate, now ironical, which made me realise the significance of lines that I had read to myself at home without paying sufficient attention to what they really meant. But all of a sudden, in the cleft of the red curtain that veiled her sanctuary, as in a frame, appeared a woman, and simultaneously with the fear that seized me, far more vexing than Berma's fear could be, lest someone should upset her by opening a window, or drown one of her lines by rustling a programme, or annoy her by applauding the others and by not applauding her enough;--in my own fashion, still more absolute than Berma's, of considering from that moment theatre, audience, play and my own body only as an acoustic medium of no importance, save in the degree to which it was favourable to the inflexions of that voice,--I realised that the two actresses whom I had been for some minutes admiring bore not the least resemblance to her whom I had come to hear. But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased; in vain might I strain towards Berma eyes, ears, mind, so as not to let one morsel escape me of the reasons which she would furnish for my admiring her, I did not succeed in gathering a single one. I could not even, as I could with her companions, distinguish in her diction and in her playing intelligent intonations, beautiful gestures. I listened to her as though I were reading _Phèdre_, or as though Phaedra herself had at that moment uttered the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that Berma's talent had added anything at all to them. I could have wished, so as to be able to explore them fully, so as to attempt to discover what it was in them that was beautiful, to arrest, to immobilise for a time before my senses every intonation of the artist's voice, every expression of her features; at least I did attempt, by dint of my mental agility in having, before a line came, my attention ready and tuned to catch it, not to waste upon preparations any morsel of the precious time that each word, each gesture occupied, and, thanks to the intensity of my observation, to manage to penetrate as far into them as if I had had whole hours to spend upon them, by myself. But how short their duration was! Scarcely had a sound been received by my ear than it was displaced there by another. In one scene, where Berma stands motionless for a moment, her arm raised to the level of a face bathed, by some piece of stagecraft, in a greenish light, before a back-cloth painted to represent the sea, the whole house broke out in applause; but already the actress had moved, and the picture that I should have liked to study existed no longer. I told my grandmother that I could not see very well; she handed me her glasses. Only, when one believes in the reality of a thing, making it visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that it is close at hand. I thought now that it was no longer Berma at whom I was looking, but her image in a magnifying glass. I put the glasses down, but then possibly the image that my eye received of her, diminished by distance, was no more exact; which of the two Bermas was the real? As for her speech to Hippolyte, I had counted enormously upon that, since, to judge by the ingenious significance which her companions were disclosing to me at every moment in less beautiful parts, she would certainly render it with intonations more surprising than any which, when reading the play at home, I had contrived to imagine; but she did not attain to the heights which Œnone or Aricie would naturally have reached, she planed down into a uniform flow of melody the whole of a passage in which there were mingled together contradictions so striking that the least intelligent of tragic actresses, even the pupils of an academy could not have missed their effect; besides which, she ran through the speech so rapidly that it was only when she had come to the last line that my mind became aware of the deliberate monotony which she had imposed on it throughout. Then, at last, a sense of admiration did possess me, provoked by the frenzied applause of the audience. I mingled my own with theirs, endeavouring to prolong the general sound so that Berma, in her gratitude, should surpass herself, and I be certain of having heard her on one of her great days. A curious thing, by the way, was that the moment when this storm of public enthusiasm broke loose was, as I afterwards learned, that in which Berma reveals one of her richest treasures. It would appear that certain transcendent realities emit all around them a radiance to which the crowd is sensitive. So it is that when any great event occurs, when on a distant frontier an army is in jeopardy, or defeated, or victorious, the vague and conflicting reports which we receive, from which an educated man can derive little enlightenment, stimulate in the crowd an emotion by which that man is surprised, and in which, once expert criticism has informed him of the actual military situation, he recognises the popular perception of that "aura" which surrounds momentous happenings, and which may be visible hundreds of miles away. One learns of a victory either after the war is over, or at once, from the hilarious joy of one's hall porter. One discovers the touch of genius in Berma's acting a week after one has heard her, in the criticism of some review, or else on the spot, from the thundering acclamation of the stalls. But this immediate recognition by the crowd was mingled with a hundred others, all quite erroneous; the applause came, most often, at wrong moments, apart from the fact that it was mechanically produced by the effect of the applause that had gone before, just as in a storm, once the sea is sufficiently disturbed, it will continue to swell, even after the wind has begun to subside. No matter; the more I applauded, the better, it seemed to me, did Berma act. "I say," came from a woman sitting near me, of no great social pretensions, "she fairly gives it you, she does; you'd think she'd do herself an injury, the way she runs about. I call that acting, don't you?" And happy to find these reasons for Berma's superiority, though not without a suspicion that they no more accounted for it than would for that of the Gioconda or of Benvenuto's Perseus a peasant's gaping "That's a good bit of work. It's all gold, look! Fine, ain't it?", I greedily imbibed the strong wine of this popular enthusiasm. I felt, all the same, when the curtain had fallen for the last time, disappointed that the pleasure for which I had so longed had been no greater, but at the same time I felt the need to prolong it, not to depart for ever, when I left the theatre, from this strange life of the stage which had, for a few hours, been my own, from which I should be tearing myself away, as though I were going into exile, when I returned to my own home, had I not hoped there to learn a great deal more about Berma from her admirer, to whom I was indebted already for the permission to go to _Phèdre_, M. de Norpois. I was introduced to him before dinner by my father, who summoned me into his study for the purpose. As I entered, the Ambassador rose, held out his hand, bowed his tall figure and fixed his blue eyes attentively on my face. As the foreign visitors who used to be presented to him, in the days when he still represented France abroad, were all more or less (even the famous singers) persons of note, with regard to whom he could tell, when he met them, that he would be able to say, later on, when he heard their names mentioned in Paris or in Petersburg, that he remembered perfectly the evening he had spent with them at Munich or Sofia, he had formed the habit of impressing upon them, by his affability, the pleasure with which he was making their acquaintance; but in addition to this, being convinced that in the life of European capitals, in contact at once with all the interesting personalities that passed through them and with the manners and customs of the native populations, one acquired a deeper insight than could be gained from books into the intellectual movement throughout Europe, he would exercise upon each newcomer his keen power of observation, so as to decide at once with what manner of man he had to deal. The Government had not for some time now entrusted to him a post abroad, but still, as soon as anyone was introduced to him, his eyes, as though they had not yet been informed of their master's retirement, began their fruitful observation, while by his whole attitude he endeavoured to convey that the stranger's name was not unknown to him. And so, all the time, while he spoke to me kindly and with the air of importance of a man who is conscious of the vastness of his own experience, he never ceased to examine me with a sagacious curiosity, and to his own profit, as though I had been some exotic custom, some historic and instructive building or some "star" upon his course. And in this way he gave proof at once, in his attitude towards me, of the majestic benevolence of the sage Mentor and of the zealous curiosity of the young Anacharsis. He offered me absolutely no opening to the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_, but put a number of questions to me on what I had been doing and reading; asked what were my own inclinations, which I heard thus spoken of for the first time as though it might be a quite reasonable thing to obey their promptings, whereas hitherto I had always supposed it to be my duty to suppress them. Since they attracted me towards Literature, he did not dissuade me from that course; on the contrary, he spoke of it with deference, as of some venerable personage whose select circle, in Rome or at Dresden, one remembers with pleasure, and regrets only that one's multifarious duties in life enable one to revisit it so seldom. He appeared to be envying me, with an almost jovial smile, the delightful hours which, more fortunate than himself and more free, I should be able to spend with such a Mistress. But the very terms that he employed shewed me Literature as something entirely different from the image that I had formed of it at Combray, and I realised that I had been doubly right in abandoning my intention. Until now, I had reckoned only that I had not the "gift" for writing; now M. de Norpois took from me the ambition also. I wanted to express to him what had been my dreams; trembling with emotion, I was painfully apprehensive that all the words which I could utter would not be the sincerest possible equivalent of what I had felt, what I had never yet attempted to formulate; that is to say that my words had no clear significance. Perhaps by a professional habit, perhaps by virtue of the calm that is acquired by every important personage whose advice is commonly sought, and who, knowing that he will keep the control of the conversation in his own hands, allows the other party to fret, to struggle, to take his time; perhaps also to emphasise the dignity of his head (Greek, according to himself, despite his sweeping whiskers), M. de Norpois, while anything was being explained to him, would preserve a facial immobility as absolute as if you had been addressing some ancient and unhearing bust in a museum. Until suddenly, falling upon you like an auctioneer's hammer, or a Delphic oracle, the Ambassador's voice, as he replied to you, would be all the more impressive, in that nothing in his face had allowed you to guess what sort of impression you had made on him, or what opinion he was about to express. "Precisely;" he suddenly began, as though the case were now heard and judged, and after allowing me to writhe in increasing helplessness beneath those motionless eyes which never for an instant left my face. "There is the case of the son of one of my friends, which, _mutatis mutandis_, is very much like yours." He adopted in speaking of our common tendency the same reassuring tone as if it had been a tendency not to literature but to rheumatics, and he had wished to assure me that it would not necessarily prove fatal. "He too has chosen to leave the Quai d'Orsay, although the way had been paved for him there by his father, and without caring what people might say, he has settled down to write. And certainly, he's had no reason to regret it. He published two years ago--of course, he's much older than you, you understand--a book dealing with the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of Victoria Nyanza, and this year he has brought out a little thing, not so important as the other, but very brightly, in places perhaps almost too pointedly written, on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army; and these have put him quite in a class by himself. He's gone pretty far already, and he's not the sort of man to stop half-way; I happen to know that (without any suggestion, of course, of his standing for election) his name has been mentioned several times, in conversation, and not at all unfavourably, at the Academy of Moral Sciences. And so, one can't say yet, of course, that he has reached the pinnacle of fame, still he has made his way, by sheer industry, to a very fine position indeed, and success--which doesn't always come only to agitators and mischief-makers and men who make trouble which is usually more than they are prepared to take--success has crowned his efforts." My father, seeing me already, in a few years' time, an Academician, was tasting a contentment which M. de Norpois raised to the supreme pitch when, after a momentary hesitation in which he appeared to be calculating the possible consequences of so rash an act, he handed me his card and said: "Why not go and see him yourself? Tell him, I sent you. He may be able to give you some good advice," plunging me by his words into as painful a state of anxiety as if he had told me that, next morning, I was to embark as cabin-boy on board a sailing ship, and to go round the world. My Aunt Léonie had bequeathed to me, together with all sorts of other things and much of her furniture, with which it was difficult to know what to do, almost all her unsettled estate--revealing thus after her death an affection for me which I had hardly suspected in her lifetime. My father, who was trustee of this estate until I came of age, now consulted M. de Norpois with regard to several of the investments. He recommended certain stocks bearing a low rate of interest, which he considered particularly sound, notably English consols and Russian four per cents. "With absolutely first class securities such as those," said M. de Norpois, "even if your income from them is nothing very great, you may be certain of never losing any of your capital." My father then told him, roughly, what else he had bought. M. de Norpois gave a just perceptible smile of congratulation; like all capitalists, he regarded wealth as an enviable thing, but thought it more delicate to compliment people upon their possessions only by a half-indicated sign of intelligent sympathy; on the other hand, as he was himself immensely rich, he felt that he shewed his good taste by seeming to regard as considerable the meagre revenues of his friends, with a happy and comforting resilience to the superiority of his own. He made amends for this by congratulating my father, without hesitation, on the "composition" of his list of investments, selected "with so sure, so delicate, so fine a taste." You would have supposed, to hear him, that he attributed to the relative values of investments, and even to investments themselves something akin to aesthetic merit. Of one, comparatively recent and still little known, which my father mentioned, M. de Norpois, like the people who have always read the books of which, you imagine, you yourself alone have ever heard, said at once, "Ah, yes, I used to amuse myself for some time with watching it in the papers; it was quite interesting," with the retrospective smile of a regular subscriber who has read the latest novel already, in monthly instalments, in his magazine. "It would not be at all a bad idea to apply for some of this new issue. It is distinctly attractive; they are offering it at a most tempting discount." But when he came to some of the older investments, my father, who could not remember their exact names, which it was easy to confuse with others of the same kind, opened a drawer and shewed the securities themselves to the Ambassador. The sight of them enchanted me. They were ornamented with cathedral spires and allegorical figures, like the old, romantic editions that I had pored over as a child. All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of _Notre-Dame de Paris_, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a "personal share" in the Water Company. The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by his natural affection for me that, in practice, his attitude towards anything that I might do was one of blind indulgence. And so he had no qualm about telling me to fetch a little "prose poem" which I had made up, years before, at Combray, while coming home from a walk. I had written it down in a state of exaltation which must, I felt certain, infect everyone who read it. But it was not destined to captivate M. de Norpois, for he handed it back to me without a word. My mother, who had the most profound respect for all my father's occupations, came in now, timidly, to ask whether dinner might be served. She was afraid to interrupt a conversation in which she herself could have no part. And indeed my father was continually reminding the Marquis of some useful suggestion which they had decided to make at the next meeting of the Commission; speaking in the peculiar tone always adopted, when in a strange environment by a pair of colleagues--as exclusive, in this respect, as two young men from the same college--whose professional routine has furnished them with a common fund of memories to which the others present have no access, and to which they are unwilling to refer before an audience. But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word. At last my father became uneasy: "I had thought," he ventured, after an endless preamble, "of asking the advice of the Commission . . ." Then from the face of the noble virtuoso, who had been sitting inert as a player in an orchestra sits until the moment comes for him to begin his part, were uttered, with an even delivery, on a sharp note, and as though they were no more than the completion (but scored for a different voice) of the phrase that my father had begun, the words: "of which you will not hesitate, of course, to call a meeting; more especially as the present members are all known to you personally, and there may be a change any day." This was not in itself a very remarkable ending. But the immobility that had preceded it made it detach itself with the crystal clarity, the almost malicious unexpectedness of those phrases in which the piano, silent until then, "takes up", at a given moment, the violoncello to which one has just been listening, in a Mozart concerto. "Well, did you enjoy your _matinée?_" asked my father, as we moved to the dining-room; meaning me to "shew off", and with the idea that my enthusiasm would give M. de Norpois a good opinion of me. "He has just been to hear Berma. You remember, we were talking about it the other day," he went on, turning towards the diplomat, in the same tone of retrospective, technical, mysterious allusiveness as if he had been referring to a meeting of the Commission. "You must have been enchanted, especially if you had never heard her before. Your father was alarmed at the effect that the little jaunt might have upon your health, which is none too good, I am told, none too robust. But I soon set his mind at rest. Theatres to-day are not what they were even twenty years ago. You have more or less comfortable seats now, and a certain amount of ventilation, although we have still a long way to go before we come up to Germany or England, which in that respect as in many others are immeasurably ahead of us. I have never seen Mme. Berma in _Phèdre_, but I have always heard that she is excellent in the part. You were charmed with her, of course?" M. de Norpois, a man a thousand times more intelligent than myself, must know that hidden truth which I had failed to extract from Berma's playing; he knew, and would reveal it to me; in answering his question I would implore him to let me know in what that truth consisted; and he would tell me, and so justify me in the longing that I had felt to see and hear the actress. I had only a moment, I must make what use I could of it and bring my cross-examination to bear upon the essential points. But what were they? Fastening my whole attention upon my own so confused impressions, with no thought of making M. de Norpois admire me, but only that of learning from him the truth that I had still to discover, I made no attempt to substitute ready made phrases for the words that failed me--I stood there stammering, until finally, in the hope of provoking him into declaring what there was in Berma that was admirable, I confessed that I had been disappointed. "What's that?" cried my father, annoyed at the bad impression which this admission of my failure to appreciate the performance must make on M. de Norpois, "What on earth do you mean; you didn't enjoy it? Why, your grandmother has been telling us that you sat there hanging on every word that Berma uttered, with your eyes starting out of your head; that everyone else in the theatre seemed quite bored, beside you." "Oh, yes, I was listening as hard as I could, trying to find out what it was that was supposed to be so wonderful about her. Of course, she's frightfully good, and all that . . ." "If she is 'frightfully good', what more do you want?" "One of the things that have undoubtedly contributed to the success of Mme. Berma," resumed M. de Norpois, turning with elaborate courtesy towards my mother, so as not to let her be left out of the conversation, and in conscientious fulfilment of his duty of politeness to the lady of the house, "is the perfect taste that she shews in selecting her parts; thus she can always be assured of success, and success of the right sort. She hardly ever appears in anything trivial. Look how she has thrown herself into the part of Phèdre. And then, she brings the same good taste to the choice of her costumes, and to her acting. In spite of her frequent and lucrative tours in England and America, the vulgarity--I will not say of John Bull; that would be unjust, at any rate to the England of the Victorian era--but of Uncle Sam has not infected her. No loud colours, no rant. And then that admirable voice, which has been of such service to her, with which she plays so delightfully--I should almost be tempted to describe it as a musical instrument!" My interest in Berma's acting had continued to grow ever since the fall of the curtain, because it was then no longer compressed within the limits of reality; but I felt the need to find explanations for it; moreover it had been fixed with the same intensity, while Berma was on the stage, upon everything that she offered, in the indivisibility of a living whole, to my eyes and ears; there was nothing separate or distinct; it welcomed, accordingly, the discovery of a reasonable cause in these tributes paid to the simplicity, to the good taste of the actress, it attracted them to itself by its power of absorption, seized hold of them, as the optimism of a drunken man seizes hold of the actions of his neighbour, in each of which he finds an excuse for emotion. "He is right!" I told myself. "What a charming voice, what an absence of shrillness, what simple costumes, what intelligence to have chosen _Phèdre._ No; I have not been disappointed!" The cold beef, spiced with carrots, made its appearance, couched by the Michelangelo of our kitchen upon enormous crystals of jelly, like transparent blocks of quartz. "You have a chef of the first order, Madame," said M. de Norpois, "and that is no small matter. I myself, who have had, when abroad, to maintain a certain style in housekeeping, I know how difficult it often is to find a perfect master-cook. But this is a positive banquet that you have set before us!" And indeed Françoise, in the excitement of her ambition to make a success, for so distinguished a guest, of a dinner the preparation of which had been obstructed by difficulties worthy of her powers, had given herself such trouble as she no longer took when we were alone, and had recaptured her incomparable Combray manner. "That is a thing you can't get in a chophouse,--in the best of them, I mean; a spiced beef in which the jelly does not taste of glue and the beef has caught the flavour of the carrots; it is admirable! Allow me to come again," he went on, making a sign to shew that he wanted more of the jelly. "I should be interested to see how your Vatel managed a dish of quite a different kind; I should like, for instance, to see him tackle a _bœuf Stroganoff._" M. de Norpois, so as to add his own contribution to the gaiety of the repast, entertained us with a number of the stories with which he was in the habit of regaling his colleagues in "the career", quoting now some ludicrous sentence uttered by a politician, an old offender, whose sentences were always long and packed with incoherent images, now some monumental epigram of a diplomat, sparkling with attic salt. But, to tell the truth, the criterion which for him set apart these two kinds of phrase in no way resembled that which I was in the habit of applying to literature. Most of the finer shades escaped me; the words which he repeated with derision seemed to me not to differ very greatly from those which he found remarkable. He belonged to the class of men who, had we come to discuss the books that I liked, would have said; "So you understand that, do you? I must confess that I do not understand, I am not initiated," but I could have matched his attitude, for I did not grasp the wit or folly, the eloquence or pomposity which he found in a statement or a speech, and the absence of any perceptible reason for one's being badly and the other's well expressed made that sort of literature seem more mysterious, more obscure to me than any other. I could distinguish only that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind. When M. de Norpois made use of certain expressions which were "common form" in the newspapers, and uttered them with emphasis, one felt that they became an official pronouncement by the mere fact of his having employed them, and a pronouncement which would provoke a string of comment. My mother was counting greatly upon the pineapple and truffle salad. But the Ambassador, after fastening for a moment on the confection the penetrating gaze of a trained observer, ate it with the inscrutable discretion of a diplomat, and without disclosing to us what he thought of it. My mother insisted upon his taking some more, which he did, but saying only, in place of the compliment for which she was hoping: "I obey, Madame, for I can see that it is, on your part, a positive ukase!" "We saw in the 'papers that you had a long talk with King Theodosius," my father ventured. "Why, yes; the King, who has a wonderful memory for faces, was kind enough to remember, when he noticed me in the stalls, that I had had the honour to meet him on several occasions at the Court of Bavaria, at a time when he had never dreamed of his oriental throne--to which, as you know, he was summoned by a European Congress, and indeed had grave doubts about accepting the invitation, regarding that particular sovereignty as unworthy of his race, the noblest, heraldically speaking, in the whole of Europe. An aide-de-camp came down to bid me pay my respects to his Majesty, whose command I hastened, naturally, to obey." "And I trust, you are satisfied with the results of his visit?" "Enchanted! One was justified in feeling some apprehension as to the manner in which a Sovereign who is still so young would handle a situation requiring tact, particularly at this highly delicate juncture. For my own part, I reposed entire confidence in the King's political sense. But I must confess that he far surpassed my expectations. The speech that he made at the Elysée, which, according to information that has come to me from a most authoritative source, was composed, from beginning to end, by himself, was fully deserving of the interest that it has aroused in all quarters. It was simply masterly; a trifle daring, I quite admit, but with an audacity which, after all, has been fully justified by the event. Traditional diplomacy is all very well in its way, but in practice it has made his country and ours live in an hermetically sealed atmosphere in which it was no longer possible to breathe. Very well! There is one method of letting in fresh air, obviously not one of the methods which one could officially recommend, but one which King Theodosius might allow himself to adopt--and that is to break the windows. Which he accordingly did, with a spontaneous good humour that delighted everybody, and also with an aptness in his choice of words in which one could at once detect the race of scholarly princes from whom he is descended through his mother. There can be no question that when he spoke of the 'affinities' that bound his country to France, the expression, rarely as it may occur in the vocabulary of the Chancellories, was a singularly happy one. You see that literary ability is no drawback, even in diplomacy, even upon a throne," he went on, turning for a moment to myself. "The community of interests had long been apparent, I quite admit, and the relations of the two Powers were excellent. Still, it needed putting into words. The word was what we were all waiting for, it was chosen with marvellous aptitude; you have seen the effect it had. For my part, I must confess I applauded openly." "Your friend M. de Vaugoubert will be pleased, after preparing for the agreement all these years." "All the more so that his Majesty, who is quite incorrigible, really, in some ways, had taken care to spring it on him as a surprise. And it did come as a complete surprise, incidentally, to everyone concerned, beginning with the Foreign Minister himself, who--I have heard--did not find it at all to his liking. It appears that someone spoke to him about it and that he replied, pretty sharply, and loud enough to be overheard by the people on either side of them: 'I have been neither consulted nor informed!' indicating clearly by that that he declined to accept any responsibility for the consequences. I must own that the incident has given rise to a great deal of comment, and I should not go so far as to deny," he went on with a malicious smile, "that certain of my colleagues, for whom the supreme law appears to be that of inertia, may have been shaken from their habitual repose. As for Vaugoubert, you are aware that he has been bitterly attacked for his policy of bringing that country into closer relations with France, which must have been more than ordinarily painful to him, he is so sensitive, such an exquisite nature. I can amply testify to that, since, for all that he is considerably my junior, I have had many dealings with him, we are friends of long standing and I know him intimately. Besides, who could help knowing him? His is a heart of crystal. Indeed, that is the one fault that there is to be found with him; it is not necessary for the heart of a diplomat to be as transparent as all that. Still, that does not prevent their talking of sending him to Rome, which would be a fine rise for him, but a pretty big plum to swallow. Between ourselves, I fancy that Vaugoubert, utterly devoid of ambition as he is, would be very well pleased, and would by no means ask for that cup to pass from him. For all we know, he may do wonders down there; he is the chosen candidate of the Consulta, and for my part I can see him very well placed, with his artistic leanings, in the setting of the Farnese Palace and the Caracci Gallery. At least you would suppose that it was impossible for any one to hate him; but there is a whole camarilla collected round King Theodosius which is more or less held in fief by the Wilhelmstrasse, whose inspiration its members dutifully absorb, and these men have done everything in their power to checkmate him. Not only has Vaugoubert had to face these backstairs intrigues, he has had to endure also the insults of a gang of hireling pamphleteers who later on, being like every subsidised journalist the most arrant cowards, have been the first to cry quits, but in the interval had not shrunk from hurling at our Representative the most fatuous accusations that the wit of irresponsible fools could invent. For a month and more Vaugoubert's enemies had been dancing round him, howling for his scalp," M. de Norpois detached this word with sharp emphasis. "But forewarned is forearmed; as for their insults, he spurned I them with his foot!" he went on with even more determination, and with so fierce a glare in his eye that for a moment we forgot our food. "In the words of a fine Arab proverb, 'The dogs may bark; the caravan goes on!'" After launching this quotation M. de Norpois paused and examined our faces, to see what effect it had had upon us. Its effect was great, the proverb being familiar to us already. It had taken the place, that year, among people who "really counted", of "He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind", which was sorely in need of a rest, not having the perennial freshness of "Working for the King of Prussia". For the culture of these eminent men was an alternate, if not a tripartite and triennial culture. Of course, the use of quotations such as these, with which M. de Norpois excelled in jewelling his articles in the _Revue_, was in no way essential to their appearing solid and well-informed. Even without the ornament which the quotations supplied, it sufficed that M. de Norpois should write at a given point (as he never failed to write): "The Court of St. James's was not the last to be sensible of the peril," or "Feeling ran high on the Singers' Bridge, which with anxious eyes was following the selfish but, skilful policy of the Dual Monarchy," or "A cry of alarm sounded from Montecitorio," or yet again, "That everlasting double dealing which is so characteristic of the Ballplatz." By these expressions the profane reader had at once recognised and had paid deference to the diplomat _de carrière._ But what had made people say that he was something more than that, that he was endowed with a superior culture, had been his careful use of quotations, the perfect example of which, at that date, was still: "Give me a good policy and I will give you good finances, _to quote the favourite words of Baron Louis_": for we had not yet imported from the Far East: "Victory is on the side that can hold out a quarter of an hour longer than the other, _as the Japanese say_". This reputation for immense literary gifts, combined with a positive genius for intrigue which he kept concealed beneath a mask of indifference, had secured the election of M. de Norpois to the Académie des Sciences Morales. And there were some who even thought that he would not be out of place in the Académie Française, on the famous day when, wishing to indicate that it was only by drawing the Russian Alliance closer that we could hope to arrive at an understanding with Great Britain, he had not hesitated to write: "Be it clearly understood in the Quai d'Orsay, be it taught henceforward in all the manuals of geography, which appear to be incomplete in this respect, be his certificate of graduation remorselessly withheld from every candidate who has not learned to say, 'If all roads lead to Rome, nevertheless the way from Paris to London runs of necessity through St. Petersburgh.'" "In short," M. de Norpois went on, addressing my father, "Vaugoubert has won himself considerable distinction from this affair, quite beyond anything on which he can have reckoned. He expected, you understand, a correctly worded speech (which, after the storm-clouds of recent years, would have been something to the good) but nothing more. Several persons who had the honour to be present have assured me that it is impossible, when one merely reads the speech, to form any conception of the effect that it produced when uttered--when articulated with marvellous clearness of diction by the King, who is a master of the art of public speaking and in that passage underlined every possible shade of meaning. I allowed myself, in this connexion, to listen to a little anecdote which brings into prominence once again that frank, boyish charm by which King Theodosius has won so many hearts. I am assured that, just as he uttered that word 'affinities', which was, of course, the startling innovation of the speech, and one that, as you will see, will provoke discussion in the Chancellories for years to come, his Majesty, anticipating the delight of our Ambassador, who was to find in that word the seal, the crown set upon all his labours, on his dreams, one might almost say, and, in a word, his marshal's baton, made a half turn towards Vaugoubert and fixing upon him his arresting gaze, so characteristic of the Oettingens, fired at him that admirably chosen word 'affinities', a positive treasure-trove, uttering it in a tone which made it plain to all his hearers that it was employed of set purpose and with full knowledge of the circumstances. It appears that Vaugoubert found some difficulty in mastering his emotion, and I must confess that, to a certain extent, I can well understand it. Indeed, a person who is entirely to be believed has told me, in confidence, that the King came up to Vaugoubert after the dinner, when His Majesty was holding an informal court, and was heard to say, 'Well, are you satisfied with your pupil, my dear Marquis?' "One thing, however," M. de Norpois concluded, "is certain; and that is that a speech like that has done more than twenty years of negotiation towards bringing the two countries together, uniting their 'affinities', to borrow the picturesque expression of Theodosius II. It is no more than a word, if you like, but look what success it has had, how the whole of the European press is repeating it, what interest it has aroused, what a new note it has struck. Besides it is distinctly in the young Sovereign's manner. I will not go so far as to say that he lights upon a diamond of that water every day. But it is very seldom that, in his prepared speeches, or better still in the impulsive flow of his conversation, he does not reveal his character--I was on the point of saying 'does not affix his signature'--by the use of some incisive word. I myself am quite free from any suspicion of partiality in this respect, for I am stoutly opposed to all innovations in terminology. Nine times out of ten they are most dangerous." "Yes, I was thinking, only the other day, that the German Emperor's telegram could not be much to your liking," said my father. M. de Norpois raised his eyes to heaven, as who should say, "Oh, that fellow!" before he replied: "In the first place, it is an act of ingratitude. It is more than a crime; it is a blunder, and one of a crassness which I can describe only as pyramidal! Indeed, unless some one puts a check on his activities, the man who has got rid of Bismarck is quite capable of repudiating by degrees the whole of the Bismarckian policy; after which it will be a leap in the dark." "My husband tells me, sir, that you are perhaps going to take him to Spain one summer; that will be nice for him; I am so glad." "Why, yes; it is an idea that greatly attracts me; I amuse myself, planning a tour. I should like to go there with you, my dear fellow. But what about you, Madame; have you decided yet how you are going to spend your holidays?" "I shall perhaps go with my son to Balbec, but I am not certain." "Oh, but Balbec is quite charming, I was down that way a few years ago. They are beginning to build some very pretty little villas there; I think you'll like the place. But may I ask what has made you choose Balbec?" "My son is very anxious to visit some of the churches in that neighbourhood, and Balbec church in particular. I was a little afraid that the tiring journey there, and the discomfort of staying in the place might be too much for him. But I hear that they have just opened an excellent hotel, in which he will be able to get all the comfort that he requires." "Indeed! I must make a note of that, for a certain person who will not turn up her nose at a comfortable hotel." "The church at Balbec is very beautiful, sir, is it not?" I inquired, repressing my sorrow at learning that one of the attractions of Balbec consisted in its pretty little villas. "No, it is not bad; but it cannot be compared for a moment with such positive jewels in stone as the Cathedrals of Rheims and Chartres, or with what is to my mind the pearl among them all, the Sainte-Chapelle here in Paris." "But, surely, Balbec church is partly romanesque, is it not?" "Why, yes, it is in the romanesque style, which is to say very cold and lifeless, with no hint in it anywhere of the grace, the fantasy of the later gothic builders, who worked their stone as if it had been so much lace. Balbec church is well worth a visit, if you are in those parts; it is decidedly quaint; on a wet day, when you have nothing better to do, you might look inside; you will see the tomb of Tourville." "Tell me, were you at the Foreign Ministry dinner last night?" asked my father. "I couldn't go." "No," M. de Norpois smiled, "I must confess that I renounced it for a party of a very different sort. I was, dining with a lady whose name you may possibly have heard, the beautiful Mme. Swann." My mother checked an impulsive movement, for, being more rapid in perception than my father, she used to alarm herself on his account over things which only began to upset him a moment later. Anything unpleasant that might occur to him was discovered first by her, just as bad news from France is always known abroad sooner than among ourselves. But she was curious to know what sort of people the Swanns managed to entertain, and so inquired of M. de Norpois as to whom he had met there. "Why, my dear lady, it is a house which (or so it struck me) is especially attractive to gentlemen. There were several married men there last night, but their wives were all, as it happened, unwell, and so had not come with them," replied the Ambassador with a mordancy sheathed in good-humour, casting on each of us a glance the gentleness and discretion of which appeared to be tempering while in reality they deftly intensified its malice. "In all fairness," he went on, "I must add that women do go to the house, but women who belong rather--what shall I say--to the Republican world than to Swann's" (he pronounced it "Svann's") "circle. Still, you can never tell. Perhaps it will turn into a political or a literary salon some day. Anyhow, they appear to be quite happy as they are. Indeed, I feel that Swann advertises his happiness just a trifle too blatantly. He told us the names of all the people who had asked him and his wife out for the next week, people with whom there was no particular reason to be proud of being intimate, with a want of reserve, of taste, almost of tact which I was astonished to remark in so refined a man. He kept on repeating, 'We haven't a free evening!' as though that had been a thing to boast of, positively like a _parvenu_, and he is certainly not that. For Swann had always plenty of friends, women as well as men, and without seeming over-bold, without the least wish to appear indiscreet, I think I may safely say that not all of them, of course, nor even the majority of them, but one at least, who is a lady of the very highest rank, would perhaps not have shewn herself inexorably averse from the idea of entering upon relations with Mme. Swann, in which case it is safe to assume that more than one sheep of the social flock would have followed her lead. But it seems that there has been no indication on Swann's part of any movement in that direction. "What do I see? A Nesselrode pudding! As well! I declare, I shall need a course at Carlsbad after such a Lucullus-feast as this. "Possibly Swann felt that there would be too much resistance to overcome. The marriage--so much is certain--was not well received. There has been some talk of his wife's having money, but that is all humbug. Anyhow, the whole affair has been looked upon with disfavour. And then, Swann has an aunt who is excessively rich and in an admirable position socially, married to a man who, financially speaking, is a power. Not only has she refused to meet Mme. Swann, she has actually started a campaign to force her friends and acquaintance to do the same. I do not mean to say that anyone who moves in a good circle in Paris has shewn any actual incivility to Mme. Swann. . . . No! A hundred times no! Quite apart from her husband's being eminently a man to take up the challenge. Anyhow, there is one curious thing about it, to see the immense importance that Swann, who knows so many and such exclusive people, attaches to a society of which the best that can be said is that it is extremely mixed. I myself, who knew him in the old days, must admit that I felt more astonished than amused at seeing a man so well-bred as he is, so much at home in the best houses, effusively thanking the Chief Secretary to the Minister of Posts for having come to them, and asking him whether Mme. Swann might _take the liberty_ of calling upon his wife. He must feel something of an exile, don't you know; evidently, it's quite a different world. I don't think, all the same, that Swann is unhappy. It is true that for some years before the marriage she was always trying to blackmail him in a rather disgraceful way; she would take the child away whenever Swann refused her anything. Poor Swann, who is as unsophisticated as he is, for all that, sharp, believed every time that the child's disappearance was a coincidence, and declined to face the facts. Apart from that, she made such continual scenes that everyone expected that, from the day she attained her object and was safely married, nothing could possibly restrain her and that their life would be a hell on earth. Instead of which, just the opposite has happened. People are inclined to laugh at the way in which Swann speaks of his wife; it's become a standing joke. Of course, one could hardly expect that, conscious, more or less of being a--(you remember Molière's line) he would go and proclaim it _urbi et orbi_; still that does not prevent one from finding a tendency in him to exaggerate when he declares that she makes an excellent wife. And yet that is not so far from the truth as people imagine. In her own way--which is not, perhaps, what all husbands would prefer, but then, between you and me, I find it difficult to believe that Swann, who has known her for ever so long and is far from being an utter fool, did not know what to expect--there can be no denying that she does seem to have a certain regard for him. I do not say that she is not flighty, and Swann himself has no fault to find with her for that, if one is to believe the charitable tongues which, as you may suppose, continue to wag. But she is distinctly grateful to him for what he has done for her, and, despite die fears that were everywhere expressed of the contrary, her temper seems to have become angelic." This alteration was perhaps not so extraordinary as M. de Norpois professed to find it. Odette had not believed that Swann would ever consent to marry her; each time that she made the suggestive announcement that some man about town had just married his mistress she had seen him stiffen into a glacial silence, or at the most, if she were directly to challenge him, asking: "Don't you think it very nice, a very fine thing that he has done, for a woman who sacrificed all her youth to him?" had heard him answer dryly: "But I don't say that there's anything wrong in it. Everyone does what he himself thinks right." She came very near, indeed, to believing that (as he used to threaten in moments of anger) he was going to leave her altogether, for she had heard it said, not long since, by a woman sculptor, that "You cannot be surprised at anything men do, they're such brutes," and impressed by the profundity of this maxim of pessimism she had appropriated it for herself, and repeated it on every possible occasion with an air of disappointment which seemed to imply: "After all, it's not impossible in any way; it would be just my luck." Meanwhile all the virtue had gone from the optimistic maxim which had hitherto guided Odette through life: "You can do anything with men when they're in love with you, they're such idiots!" a doctrine which was expressed on her face by the same tremor of an eyelid that might have accompanied such words as: "Don't be frightened; he won't break anything." While she waited, Odette was tormented by the thought of what one of her friends, who had been married by a man who had not lived with her for nearly so long as Odette herself had lived with Swann, and had had no child by him, and who was now in a definitely respectable position, invited to the balls at the Elysée and so forth, must think of Swann's behaviour. A consultant more discerning than M. de Norpois would doubtless have been able to diagnose that it was this feeling of shame and humiliation that had embittered Odette, that the devilish characteristics which she displayed were no essential part of her, no irremediable evil, and so would easily have foretold what had indeed come to pass, namely that a new rule of life, the matrimonial, would put an end, with almost magic swiftness, to these painful incidents, of daily occurrence but in no sense organic. Practically everyone was surprised at the marriage, and this, in itself, is surprising. No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that they see. It would appear, none the less, that so far as Odette was concerned people might have taken into account the fact that if, indeed, she had never entirely understood Swann's mentality, at least she was acquainted with the titles, and with all the details of his studies, so much so that the name of Vermeer was as familiar to her as that of her own dressmaker; while as for Swann himself she knew intimately those traits of character of which the rest of the world must remain ignorant or merely laugh at them, and only a mistress or a sister may gain possession of the revealing, cherished image; and so strongly are we attached to such eccentricities, even to those of them which we are most anxious to correct, that it is because a woman comes in time to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking familiarity, such as we ourselves have with them, or our relatives have, that amours of long standing have something of the sweetness and strength of family affection. The bonds that unite us to another creature receive their consecration when that creature adopts the same point of view as ourself in judging one of our imperfections. And among these special traits there were others, besides, which belonged as much to his intellect as to his character, which, all the same, because they had their roots in the latter, Odette had been able more easily to discern. She complained that when Swann turned author, when he published his essays, these characteristics were not to be found in them as they were in his letters, or in his conversation, where they abounded. She urged him to give them a more prominent place. She would have liked that because it was these things that she herself preferred in him, but since she preferred them because they were the things most typical of himself, she was perhaps not wrong in wishing that they might be found in his writings. Perhaps also she thought that his work, if endowed with more vitality, so that it ultimately brought him success, might enable her also to form what at the Verdurins' she had been taught to value above everything else in the world--a salon. Among the people to whom this sort of marriage appeared ridiculous, people who in their own case would ask themselves, "What will M. de Guermantes think, what will Bréauté say when I marry Mlle. de Montmorency?", among the people who cherished that sort of social ideal would have figured, twenty years earlier, Swann himself, the Swann who had taken endless pains to get himself elected to the Jockey Club, and had reckoned at that time on making a brilliant marriage which, by consolidating his position, would have made him one of the most conspicuous figures in Paris. Only, the visions which a marriage like that suggests to the mind of the interested party need, like all visions, if they are not to fade away and be altogether lost, to receive sustenance from without. Your most ardent longing is to humiliate the man who has insulted you. But if you never hear of him again, having removed to some other place, your enemy will come to have no longer the slightest importance for you. If one has lost sight for a score of years of all the people on whose account one would have liked to be elected to the Jockey Club or the Institute, the prospect of becoming a member of one or other of those corporations will have ceased to tempt one. Now fully as much as retirement, ill-health or religious conversion, protracted relations with a woman will substitute fresh visions for the old. There was not on Swann's part, when he married Odette, any renunciation of his social ambitions, for from these ambitions Odette had long ago, in the spiritual sense of the word, detached him. Besides, had he not been so detached, his marriage would have been all the more creditable. It is because they imply the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a purely private happiness that, as a general rule, "impossible" marriages are the happiest of all. (One cannot very well include among the "impossible" marriages those that are made for money, there being no instance on record of a couple, of whom the wife or even the husband has thus sold himself, who have not sooner or later been admitted into society, if only by tradition, and on the strength of so many precedents, and so as not to have two conflicting standards.) Perhaps, on the other hand, the artistic, if not the perverse side of Swann's nature would in any event have derived a certain amount of pleasure from coupling with himself, in one of those crossings of species such as Mendelians practise and mythology records, a creature of a different race, archduchess or prostitute, from contracting a royal alliance or from marrying beneath him. There had been but one person in all the world whose opinion he took into consideration whenever he thought of his possible marriage with Odette; that was, and from no snobbish motive, the Duchesse de Guermantes. With whom Odette, on the contrary, was but little concerned, thinking only of those people whose position was immediately above her own, rather than in so vague an empyrean. But when Swann in his daydreams saw Odette as already his wife he invariably formed a picture of the moment in which he would take her--her, and above all her daughter--to call upon the Princesse des Laumes (who was shortly, on the death of her father-in-law, to become Duchesse de Guermantes). He had no desire to introduce them anywhere else, but his heart would soften as he invented--uttering their actual words to himself--all the things that the Duchess would say of him to Odette, and Odette to the Duchess, the affection that she would shew for Gilberte, spoiling her, making him proud of his child. He enacted to himself the scene of this introduction with the same precision in each of its imaginary details that people shew when they consider how they would spend, supposing they were to win it, a lottery prize the amount of which they have arbitrarily determined. In so far as a mental picture which accompanies one of our resolutions may be said to be its motive, so it might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to present her and Gilberte, without anyone's else being present, without, if need be, anyone's else ever coming to know of it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. We shall see how this sole social ambition that he had entertained for his wife and daughter was precisely that one the realisation of which proved to be forbidden him by a veto so absolute that Swann died in the belief that the Duchess would never possibly come to know them. We shall see also that, on the contrary, the Duchesse de Guermantes did associate with Odette and Gilberte after the death of Swann. And doubtless he would have been wiser--seeing that he could attach so much importance to so small a matter--not to have formed too dark a picture of the future, in this connexion, but to have consoled himself with the hope that the meeting of the ladies might indeed take place when he was no longer there to enjoy it. The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including (consequently) those which one had believed to be most nearly impossible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our impatience (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it) and by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire it--have ceased, possibly, to live. Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, had there not been already, in his life, as it were a prefiguration of what was to happen after his death, a posthumous happiness in this marriage with this Odette whom he had passionately loved--even if she had not been pleasing to him at first sight--whom he had married when he no longer loved her, when the creature that, in Swann, had so longed to live, had so despaired of living all its life in company with Odette, when that creature was extinct? I began next to speak of the Comte de Paris, to ask whether he was not one of Swann's friends, for I was afraid lest the conversation should drift away from him. "Why, yes!" replied M. de Norpois, turning towards me and fixing upon my modest person the azure gaze in which floated, as in their vital element, his immense capacity for work and his power of assimilation. And "Upon my word," he added, once more addressing my father, "I do not think that I shall be overstepping the bounds of the respect which I have always professed for the Prince (though without, you understand, maintaining any personal relations with him, which would inevitably compromise my position, unofficial as that may be), if I tell you of a little episode which is not without point; no more than four years ago, at a small railway station in one of the countries of Central Europe, the Prince happened to set eyes on Mme. Swann. Naturally, none of his circle ventured to ask his Royal Highness what he thought of her. That would not have been seemly. But when her name came up by chance in conversation, by certain signs--imperceptible, if you like, but quite unmistakable--the Prince appeared willing enough to let it be understood that his impression of her had, in a word, been far from unfavourable." "But there could have been no possibility, surely, of her being presented to the Comte de Paris?" inquired my father. "Well, we don't know; with Princes one never does know," replied M. de Norpois. "The most exalted, those who know best how to secure what is due to them, are as often as not the last to let themselves be embarrassed by the decrees of popular opinion, even by those for which there is most justification, especially when it is a question of their rewarding a personal attachment to themselves. Now it is certain that the Comte de Paris has always most graciously recognised the devotion of Swann, who is, for that matter, a man of character, in spite of it all." "And what was your own impression, your Excellency? Do tell us!" my mother asked, from politeness as well as from curiosity. All the energy of the old connoisseur broke through the habitual moderation of his speech as he answered: "Quite excellent!" And knowing that the admission that a strong impression has been made on one by a woman takes its place, provided that one makes it in a playful tone, in a certain category of the art of conversation that is highly appreciated, he broke into a little laugh that lasted for several seconds, moistening the old diplomat's blue eyes and making his nostrils, with their network of tiny scarlet veins, quiver. "She is altogether charming!" "Was there a writer of the name of Bergotte at this dinner, sir?" I asked timidly, still trying to keep the conversation to the subject of the Swanns. "Yes, Bergotte was there," replied M. de Norpois, inclining his head courteously towards me, as though in his desire to be pleasant to my father he attached to everything connected with him a real importance, even to the questions of a boy of my age who was not accustomed to see such politeness shewn to him by persons of his. "Do you know him?" he went on, fastening on me that clear gaze, the penetration of which had won the praise of Bismarck. "My son does not know him, but he admires his work immensely," my mother explained. "Good heavens!" exclaimed M. de Norpois, inspiring me with doubts of my own intelligence far more serious than those that ordinarily distracted me, when I saw that what I valued a thousand times more than myself, what I regarded as the most exalted thing in the world, was for him at the very foot of the scale of admiration. "I do not share your son's point of view. Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays on it very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all is said, it is no more than that, and that is nothing very great. Nowhere does one find in his enervated writings anything that could be called construction. No action--or very little--but above all no range. His books fail at the foundation, or rather they have no foundation at all. At a time like the present, when the ever increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone radical alterations, and is on the eve, very probably, of undergoing others more drastic still, when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side, you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something else than a fine intellect which makes us forget, amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians, those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that this is a blasphemy against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term 'Art for Art's sake', but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner. Not that Bergotte's manner is not now and then quite attractive. I have no fault to find with that, but taken as a whole, it is all very precious, very thin, and has very little virility. I can now understand more easily, when I bear in mind your altogether excessive regard for Bergotte, the few lines that you shewed me just now, which it would have been unfair to you not to overlook, since you yourself told me, in all simplicity, that they were merely a childish scribbling." (I had, indeed, said so, but I did not think anything of the sort.) "For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth. After all, others as well as yourself have such sins upon their conscience, and you are not the only one who has believed himself to be a poet in his day. But one can see in what you have shewn me the evil influence of Bergotte. You will not, of course, be surprised when I say that there was in it none of his good qualities, since he is a past-master in the art--incidentally quite superficial--of handling a certain style of which, at your age, you cannot have acquired even the rudiments. But already there is the same fault, that paradox of stringing together fine-sounding words and only afterwards troubling about what they mean. That is putting the cart before the horse, even in Bergotte's books. All those Chinese puzzles of form, all these deliquescent mandarin subtleties seem to me to be quite futile. Given a few fireworks, let off prettily enough by an author, and up goes the shout of genius. Works of genius are not so common as all that! Bergotte cannot place to his credit--does not carry in his baggage, if I may use the expression--a single novel that is at all lofty in its conception, any of those books which one keeps in a special corner of one's library. I do not discover one such in the whole of his work. But that does not exclude the fact that, with him, the work is infinitely superior to the author. Ah! there is a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books. It would be impossible to imagine an individual who corresponded less to his--more pretentious, more pompous, less fitted for human society. Vulgar at some moments, at others talking like a book, and not even like one of his own, but like a boring book, which his, to do them justice, are not--such is your Bergotte. He has the most confused mind, alembicated, what our ancestors called a _diseur de phébus_, and he makes the things that he says even more unpleasant by the manner in which he says them. I forget for the moment whether it is Loménie or Sainte-Beuve who tells us that Vigny repelled people by the same eccentricity. But Bergotte has never given us a _Cinq-Mars_, or a _Cachet Rouge_, certain pages of which are regular anthology pieces." Paralysed by what M. de Norpois had just said to me with regard to the fragment which I had submitted to him, and remembering at the same time the difficulties that I experienced when I attempted to write an essay or merely to devote myself to serious thought, I felt conscious once again of my intellectual nullity and that I was not born for a literary life. Doubtless in the old days at Combray certain impressions of a very humble order, or a few pages of Bergotte used to plunge me into a state of musing which had appeared to me to be of great value. But this state was what my poem in prose reflected; there could be no doubt that M. de Norpois had at once grasped and had seen through the fallacy of what I had discovered to be beautiful simply by a mirage that must be entirely false since the Ambassador had not been taken in by it. He had shewn me, on the other hand, what an infinitely unimportant place was mine when I was judged from outside, objectively, by the best-disposed and most intelligent of experts. I felt myself to be struck speechless, overwhelmed; and my mind, like a fluid which is without dimensions save those of the vessel that is provided for it, just as it had been expanded a moment ago so as to fill all the vast capacity of genius, contracted now was entirely contained in the straitened mediocrity in which M. de Norpois had of a sudden enclosed and sealed it. "Our first introduction--I speak of Bergotte and myself----" he resumed, turning to my father, "was somewhat beset with thorns (which is, after all, only another way of saying that it was not lacking in points). Bergotte--some years ago, now--paid a visit to Vienna while I was Ambassador there; he was presented to me by the Princess Metternich, came and wrote his name, and expected to be asked to the Embassy. Now, being in a foreign country as the Representative of France, to which he has after all done some honour by his writings, to a certain extent (let us say, to be quite accurate, to a very slight extent), I was prepared to set aside the unfavourable opinion that I hold of his private life. But he was not travelling alone, and he actually let it be understood that he was not to be invited without his companion. I trust that I am no more of a prude than most men, and, being a bachelor, I was perhaps in a position to throw open the doors of the Embassy a little wider than if I had been married and the father of a family. Nevertheless, I must admit that there are depths of degradation to which I should hesitate to descend, while these are rendered more repulsive still by the tone, not moral, merely--let us be quite frank and say moralising,--that Bergotte takes up in his books, where one finds nothing but perpetual and, between ourselves, somewhat wearisome analyses, torturing scruples, morbid remorse, and all for the merest peccadilloes, the most trivial naughtinesses (as one knows from one's own experience), while all the time he is shewing such an utter lack of conscience and so much cynicism in his private life. To cut a long story short, I evaded the responsibility, the Princess returned to the charge, but without success. So that I do not suppose that I appear exactly in the odour of sanctity to the gentleman, and I am not sure how far he appreciated Swann's kindness in inviting him and myself on the same evening. Unless of course it was he who asked for the invitation. One can never tell, for really he is not normal. Indeed that is his sole excuse." "And was Mme. Swann's daughter at the dinner?" I asked M. de Norpois, taking advantage, to put this question, of a moment in which, as we all moved towards the drawing-room, I could more easily conceal my emotion than would have been possible at table, where I was held fast in the glare of the lamplight. M. de Norpois appeared to be trying for a moment to remember: then, "Yes, you mean a young person of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, of course, I remember now that she was introduced to me before dinner as the daughter of our Amphitryon. I may tell you that I saw but little of her; she retired to bed early. Or else she went out to see a friend--I forget. But I can see that you are very intimate with the Swann household." "I play with Mlle. Swann in the Champs-Elysées, and she is delightful." "Oh! so that is it, is it? But I assure you, I thought her charming. I must confess to you, however, that I do not believe that she will ever be anything like her mother, if I may say as much without wounding you in a vital spot." "I prefer Mlle. Swann's face, but I admire her mother, too, enormously; I go for walks in the Bois simply in the hope of seeing her pass." "Ah! But I must tell them that; they will be highly flattered." While he was uttering these words, and for a few seconds after he had uttered them, M. de Norpois was still in the same position as anyone else who, hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his family as respectable stockbrokers, of his house as a fine house, imagined that I would speak just as readily of another man equally intelligent, of other stockbrokers equally respectable, of another house equally fine; it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that his companion is mad. M. de Norpois knew that there was nothing unnatural in the pleasure which one derived from looking at pretty women, that it was a social convention, when anyone spoke to you of a pretty woman with any fervour, to pretend to think that he was in love with her, and to promise to further his designs. But in saying that he would speak of me to Gilberte and her mother (which would enable me, like an Olympian deity who has taken on the fluidity of a breath of wind, or rather the aspect of the old greybeard whose form Minerva borrows, to penetrate, myself, unseen, into Mme. Swann's drawing-room, to attract her attention, to occupy her thoughts, to arouse her gratitude for my admiration, to appear before her as the friend of an important person, to seem to her worthy to be invited by her in the future and to enter into the intimate life of her family), this important person who was going to make use, in my interests, of the great influence which he must have with Mme. Swann inspired in me suddenly an affection so compelling that I had difficulty in restraining myself from kissing his gentle hands, white and crumpled, which looked as though they had been left lying too long in water. I even sketched in the air an outline of that impulsive movement, but this I supposed that I alone had observed. For it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly on what scale his words or his gestures are apparent to others. Partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to extend, we imagine that the accessories of our speech and attitudes scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the memory of those with whom we converse. It is, we may suppose, to a prompting of this sort that criminals yield when they "touch up" the wording of a statement already made, thinking that the new variant cannot be confronted with any existing version. But it is quite possible that, even in what concerns the millennial existence of the human race, the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is destined to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in which the moralist of the "Paris column" says to us of an event, of a work of art, all the more forcibly of a singer who has enjoyed her "crowded hour": "Who will remember this in ten years' time?" overleaf does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions speak often of a fact, in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is now known again in its entirety? Is it not, perhaps, just the same in our brief life on earth? And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois, who was also calling there, had seemed to me the most solid support that I could hope to find, because he was the friend of my father, indulgent, inclined to wish us all well, and besides, by his profession and upbringing, trained to discretion, when, after the Ambassador had gone, I was told that he had alluded to an evening long ago when he had seen the moment in which I was just going to kiss his hands, not only did I colour up to the roots of my hair but I was stupefied to learn how different from all that I had believed were not only the manner in which M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the constituents of his memory: this tittle-tattle enlightened me as to the incalculable proportions of absence and presence of mind, of recollection and forgetfulness which go to form the human intelligence; and I was as marvellously surprised as on the day on which I read for the first time, in one of Maspero's books, that we had an exact list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used to invite to his hunts, a thousand years before the Birth of Christ. "Oh, sir," I assured M. de Norpois, when he told me that he would inform Gilberte and her mother how much I admired them, "if you would do that, if you would speak of me to Mme. Swann, my whole life would not be long enough for me to prove my gratitude, and that life would be all at your service. But I feel bound to point out to you that I do not know Mme. Swann, and that I have never been introduced to her." I had added these last words from a scruple of conscience, and so as not to appear to be boasting of an acquaintance which I did not possess. But while I was uttering them I felt that they were already superfluous, for from the beginning of my speech of thanks, with its chilling ardour, I had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador an expression of hesitation and dissatisfaction, and in his eyes that vertical, narrow, slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body in perspective, the receding line of one of its surfaces), that look which one addresses to the invisible audience whom one has within oneself at the moment when one is saying something that one's other audience, the person whom one has been addressing--myself, in this instance--is not meant to hear. I realised in a flash that these phrases which I had pronounced, which, feeble as they were when measured against the flood of gratitude that was coursing through me, had seemed to me bound to touch M. de Norpois and to confirm his decision upon an intervention which would have given him so little trouble and me so much joy, were perhaps (out of all those that could have been chosen, with diabolical malice, by persons anxious to do me harm) the only ones that could result in making him abandon his intention. Indeed, when he heard me speak, just as at the moment when a stranger with whom we have been exchanging--quite pleasantly--our impressions, which we might suppose to be similar to his, of the passers-by, whom we have agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals suddenly the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding carelessly, as he runs his hand over his pocket: "What a pity, I haven't got my revolver here; I could have picked off the lot!" M. de Norpois, who knew that nothing was less costly or more easy than to be commended to Mme. Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on the contrary, such favours bore so high a price and were consequently, no doubt, of great difficulty, thought that the desire, apparently normal, which I had expressed must cloak some different thought, some suspect intention, some pre-existent fault, on account of which, in the certainty of displeasing Mme. Swann, no one hitherto had been willing to undertake the responsibility for conveying a message to her from me. And I understood that this office was one which he would never discharge, that he might see Mme. Swann daily, for years to come, without ever mentioning my name. He did indeed ask her, a few days later, for some information which I required, and charged my father to convey it to me. But he had not thought it his duty to tell her at whose instance he was inquiring. So she would never discover that I knew M. de Norpois and that I hoped so greatly to be asked to her house; and this was perhaps a less misfortune than I supposed. For the second of these discoveries would probably not have added much to the efficacy, in any event uncertain, of the first. In Odette the idea of her own life and of her home awakened no mysterious disturbance; a person who knew her, who came to see her, did not seem to her a fabulous creature such as he seemed to me who would have flung a stone through Swann's windows if I could have written upon it that I knew M. de Norpois; I was convinced that such a message, even when transmitted in so brutal a fashion, would have done far more to exalt me in the eyes of the lady of the house than it would have prejudiced her against me. But even if I had been capable of understanding that the mission which M. de Norpois did not perform must have remained futile, nay, more than that, might even have damaged my credit with the Swanns, I should not have had the courage, had he shewn himself consenting, to release the Ambassador from it, and to renounce the pleasure--however fatal its consequences might prove--of feeling that my name and my person were thus brought for a moment into Gilberte's presence, in her unknown life and home. After M. de Norpois had gone my father cast an eye over the evening paper; I dreamed once more of Berma. The pleasure which I had found in listening to her required to be made complete, all the more because it had fallen far short of what I had promised myself; and so it at once assimilated everything that was capable of giving it nourishment, those merits, for instance, which M. de Norpois had admitted that Berma possessed, and which my mind had absorbed at one draught, like a dry lawn when water is poured on it. Then my father handed me the newspaper, pointing me out a paragraph which ran more or less as follows:-- The performance of _Phèdre_, given this afternoon before an enthusiastic audience, which included the foremost representatives of society and the arts, as well as the principal critics, was for Mme. Berma, who played the heroine, the occasion of a triumph as brilliant as any that she has known in the course of her phenomenal career. We shall discuss more fully in a later issue this performance, which is indeed an event in the history of the stage; for the present we need only add that the best qualified judges are unanimous in the pronouncement that such an interpretation sheds an entirely new light on the part of Phèdre, which is one of the finest and most studied of Racine's creations, and that it constitutes the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art which it has been the privilege of our generation to witness. Immediately my mind had conceived this new idea of "the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art", it, the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt in the theatre, added to it a little of what was lacking, and their combination formed something so exalting that I cried out within myself: "What a great artist!" It may doubtless be argued that I was not absolutely sincere. But let us bear in mind, rather, the numberless writers who, dissatisfied with the page which they have just written, if they read some eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of some great artist whose equal they aspire to be, by humming to themselves, for instance, a phrase of Beethoven, the melancholy of which they compare with what they have been trying to express in prose, are so filled with that idea of genius that they add it to their own productions, when they think of them once again, see them no longer in the light in which at first they appeared, and, hazarding an act of faith in the value of their work, say to themselves: "After all!" without taking into account that, into the total which determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced the memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to their own, but of which, in cold fact, they are not the authors; let us bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a mistress on the evidence only of her betrayals; all those, too, who are sustained by the alternative hopes, either of an incomprehensible survival of death, when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the wives whom they have lost but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of the posthumous glory which they may thus enjoy; or else the hope of complete extinction which comforts them when their thoughts turn to the misdeeds that otherwise they must his own meditation, which do not appear to him to be of great value since he does not separate them from himself, oblige a publisher to choose a kind of paper, to employ a fount of type finer, perhaps, than they deserve, I asked myself whether my desire to write was of sufficient importance to justify my father in dispensing so much generosity. But apart from that, when he spoke of my inclinations as no longer liable to change, he awakened in me two terrible suspicions. The first was that (at a time when, every day, I regarded myself as standing upon the threshold of a life which was still intact and would not enter upon its course until the following morning) my existence was already begun, and that, furthermore, what was yet to follow would not differ to any extent from what had already elapsed. The second suspicion, which was nothing more, really, than a variant of the first, was that I was not situated somewhere outside the realm of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like the people in novels who, for that reason, used to plunge me in such depression when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my wicker sentry-box. In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. In saying of me, "He is no longer a child", "His tastes will not change now", and so forth, my father had suddenly made me apparent to myself in my position in Time, and caused me the same kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old pensioner, but one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a book: "He very seldom comes up now from the country. He has finally decided to end his days there." Meanwhile my father, so as to forestall any criticism that we might feel tempted to make of our guest, said to my mother: "Upon my word, old Norpois was rather 'typical', as you call it, this evening, wasn't he? When he said that it would not have been 'seemly' to ask the Comte de Paris a question, I was quite afraid you would burst out laughing." "Not at all!" answered my mother. "I was delighted to see a man of his standing, and age too, keep that sort of simplicity, which is really a sign of straightforwardness and good-breeding." "I should think so, indeed! That does not prevent his having a shrewd and discerning mind; I know him well, I see him at the Commission, remember, where he is very different from what he was here," exclaimed my father, who was glad to see that Mamma appreciated M. de Norpois, and anxious to persuade her that he was even superior to what she supposed, because a cordial nature exaggerates a friend's qualities with as much pleasure as a mischievous one finds in depreciating them. "What was it that he said, again--'With Princes one never does know.' . . .?" "Yes, that was it. I noticed it at the time; it was very neat. You can see that he has a vast experience of life." "The astonishing thing is that he should have been dining with the Swanns, and that he seems to have found quite respectable people there, officials even. How on earth can Mme. Swann have managed to catch them?" "Did you notice the malicious way he said: 'It is a house which is especially attractive to gentlemen!'?" And each of them attempted to reproduce the manner in which M. de Norpois had uttered these words, as they might have attempted to capture some intonation of Bressant's voice or of Thiron's in _L'Aventurière_ or in the _Gendre de M. Poirier._ But of all his sayings there was none so keenly relished as one was by Françoise, who, years afterwards, even, could not "keep a straight face" if we reminded her that she had been qualified by the Ambassador as "a chef of the first order", a compliment which my mother had gone in person to transmit to her, as a War Minister publishes the congratulations addressed to him by a visiting Sovereign after the grand review. I, as it happened, had preceded my mother to the kitchen. For I had extorted from Françoise, who though opposed to war was cruel, that she would cause no undue suffering to the rabbit which she had to kill, and I had had no report yet of its death. Françoise assured me that it had passed away as peacefully as could be desired, and very swiftly. "I have never seen a beast like it; it died without uttering a word; you would have thought it was dumb." Being but little versed in the language of beasts I suggested that the rabbit had not, perhaps, a cry like the chicken's. "Just wait till you see," said Françoise, filled with contempt for my ignorance, "if rabbits don't cry every bit as much as chickens. Why, they are far noisier." She received the compliments of M. de Norpois with the proud simplicity, the joyful and (if but for the moment) intelligent expression of an artist when someone speaks to him of his art. My mother had sent her when she first came to us to several of the big restaurants to see how the cooking there was done. I had the same pleasure, that evening, in hearing her dismiss the most famous of them as mere cookshops that I had had long ago, when I learned with regard to theatrical artists that the hierarchy of their merits did not at all correspond to that of their reputations. "The Ambassador," my mother told her, "assured me that he knows no place where he can get cold beef and _soufflés_ as good as yours." Françoise, with an air of modesty and of paying just homage to the truth, agreed, but seemed not at all impressed by the title "Ambassador"; she said of M. de Norpois, with the friendliness due to a man who had taken her for a chef: "He's a good old soul, like me." She had indeed hoped to catch sight of him as he arrived, but knowing that Mamma hated their standing about behind doors and in windows, and thinking that Mamma would get to know from the other servants or from the porter that she had been keeping watch (for Françoise saw everywhere nothing but "jealousies" and "tale-bearings", which played the same grim and unending part in her imagination as do for others of us the intrigues of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had contented herself with a peep from the kitchen window, "so as not to have words with Madame," and beneath the momentary aspect of M. de Norpois had "thought it was Monsieur Legrand," because of what she called his "agelity" and in spite of their having not a single point in common. "Well," inquired my mother, "and how do you explain that nobody else can make a jelly as well as you--when you choose?" "I really couldn't say how that becomes about," replied Françoise, who had established no very clear line of demarcation between the verb "to come", in certain of its meanings at least, and the verb "to become". She was speaking the truth, if not the whole truth, being scarcely more capable--or desirous--of revealing the mystery which ensured the superiority of her jellies or her creams than a leader of fashion the secrets of her toilet or a great singer those of her song. Their explanations tell us little; it was the same with the recipes furnished by our cook. "They do it in too much of a hurry," she went on, alluding to the great restaurants, "and then it's not all done together. You want the beef to become like a sponge, then it will drink up all the juice to the last drop. Still, there was one of those Cafés where I thought they did know a little bit about cooking. I don't say it was altogether my jelly, but it was very nicely done, and the _soufflés_ had plenty of cream." "Do you mean Henry's?" asked my father (who had now joined us), for he greatly enjoyed that restaurant in the Place Gaillon where he went regularly to club dinners. "Oh, dear no!" said Françoise, with a mildness which cloaked her profound contempt. "I meant a little restaurant. At that Henry's it's all very good, sure enough, but it's not a restaurant, it's more like a--soup-kitchen." "Weber's, then?" "Oh, no, sir, I meant a good restaurant. Weber's, that's in the Rue Royale; that's not a restaurant, it's a drinking-shop. I don't know that the food they give you there is even served. I think they don't have' any table-cloths; they just shove it down in front of you like that, with a take it or leave it." "Ciro's?" "Oh! there I should say they have the cooking done by ladies of the world." ("World" meant for Françoise the under-world.) "Lord! They need that to fetch the boys in." We could see that, with all her air of simplicity, Françoise was for the celebrities of her profession a more disastrous "comrade" than the most jealous, the most infatuated of actresses. We felt, all the same, that she had a proper feeling for her art and a respect for tradition; for she went on: "No, I mean a restaurant where they looked as if they kept a very good little family table. It's a place of some consequence, too. Plenty of custom there. Oh, they raked in the coppers there, all right." Françoise, being an economist, reckoned in coppers, where your plunger would reckon in gold. "Madame knows the place well enough, down there to the right along the main boulevards, a little way back." The restaurant of which she spoke with this blend of pride and good-humoured tolerance was, it turned out, the Café Anglais. When New Year's Day came, I first of all paid a round of family visits with Mamma who, so as not to tire me, had planned them beforehand (with the aid of an itinerary drawn up by my father) according to districts rather than to degrees of kinship. But no sooner had we entered the drawing-room of the distant cousin whose claim to being visited first was that her house was at no distance from ours, than my mother was horrified to see standing there, his present of _marrons glacés_ or _déguisés_ in his hand, the bosom friend of the most sensitive of all my uncles, to whom he would at once go and report that we had not begun our round with him. And this uncle would certainly be hurt; he would have thought it quite natural that we should go from the Madeleine to the Jardin des Plantes, where he lived, before stopping at Saint-Augustin, on our way to the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine. Our visits ended (my grandmother had dispensed us from the duty of calling on her, since we were to dine there that evening), I ran all the way to the Champs-Elysées to give to our own special stall-keeper, with instructions to hand it over to the person who came to her several times a week from the Swanns to buy gingerbread, the letter which, on the day when my friend had caused me so much anxiety, I had decided to send her at the New Year, and in which I told her that our old friendship was vanishing with the old year, that I would forget, now, my old sorrows and disappointments, and that, from this first day of January, it was a new friendship that we were going to cement, one so solid that nothing could destroy it, so wonderful that I hoped that Gilberte would go out of her way to preserve it in all its beauty, and to warn me in time, as I promised to warn her, should either of us detect the least sign of a peril that might endanger it. On our way home Françoise made me stop at the corner of the Rue Royale, before an open air stall from which she selected for her own stock of presents photographs of Pius IX and Raspail, while for myself I purchased one of Berma. The innumerable admiration which that artist excited gave an air almost of poverty to this one face that she had to respond with, unalterable and precarious as are the garments of people who have not a "change", this face on which she must continually expose to view only the tiny dimple upon her upper lip, the arch of her eyebrows, a few other physical peculiarities always the same, which, when it came to that, were at the mercy of a burn or a blow. This face, moreover, could not in itself have seemed to me beautiful, but it gave me the idea, and consequently the desire to kiss it by reason of all the kisses that it must have received, for which, from its page in the album, it seemed still to be appealing with that coquettishly tender gaze, that artificially ingenuous smile. For our Berma must indeed have felt for many young men those longings which she confessed under cover of the personality of Phaedra, longings of which everything, even the glamour of her name which enhanced her beauty and prolonged her youth, must render the gratification so easy to her. Night was falling; I stopped before a column of playbills, on which was posted that of the piece in which she was to appear on January I. A moist and gentle breeze was blowing. It was a time of day and year that I knew; I suddenly felt a presentiment that New Year's Day was not a day different from the rest, that it was not the first day of a new world, in which I might, by a chance that had never yet occurred, that was still intact, make Gilberte's acquaintance afresh, as at the Creation of the World, as though the past had no longer any existence, as though there had been obliterated, with the indications which I might have preserved for my future guidance, the disappointments which she had sometimes brought me; a new world in which nothing should subsist from the old--save one thing, my desire that Gilberte should love me. I realised that if my heart hoped for such a reconstruction, round about it, of a universe that had not satisfied it before, it was because my heart had not altered, and I told myself that there was no reason why Gilberte's should have altered either; I felt that this new friendship was the same, just as there is no boundary ditch between their fore-runners and those new years which our desire for them, without being able to reach and so to modify them, invests, unknown to themselves, with distinctive names. I might dedicate this new year, if I chose, to Gilberte, and as one bases a religious system upon the blind laws of nature, endeavour to stamp New Year's Day with the particular image that I had formed of it; but in vain, I felt that it was not aware that people called it New Year's Day, that it was passing in a wintry dusk in a manner that was not novel to me; in the gentle breeze that floated about the column of playbills I had recognised, I had felt reappear the eternal, the universal substance, the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of the old days and years. I returned to the house. I had spent the New Year's Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from Gilberte. I was young still, none the less, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shewn. After I was in bed, the noises of the street, unduly prolonged upon this festive evening, kept me awake. I thought of all the people who were ending the night in pleasure, of the lover, the troop, it might be, of debauchees who would be going to meet Berma at the stage-door after the play that I had seen announced for this evening. I was not even able, so as to calm the agitation which that idea engendered in me during my sleepless night, to assure myself that Berma was not, perhaps, thinking about love, since the lines that she was reciting, which she had long and carefully rehearsed, reminded her at every moment that love is an exquisite thing, as of course she already knew, and knew so well that she displayed its familiar pangs--only enriched with a new violence and an unsuspected sweetness--to her astonished audience; and yet each of them had felt those pangs himself. I lighted my candle again, to look once more upon her face. At the thought that it was, no doubt, at that very moment being caressed by those men whom I could not prevent from giving to Berma and receiving from her joys superhuman but vague, I felt an emotion more cruel than voluptuous, a longing that was aggravated presently by the sound of a horn, as one hears it on the nights of the Lenten carnival and often of other public holidays, which, because it then lacks all poetry, is more saddening, coming from a toy squeaker, than "at evening, in the depth of the woods." At that moment, a message from Gilberte would perhaps not have been what I wanted. Our desires cut across one another's paths, and in this confused existence it is but rarely that a piece of good fortune coincides with the desire that clamoured for it. I continued to go to the Champs-Elysées on fine days, along streets whose stylish pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of water-colours were then at the height of fashion) in a lightly floating atmosphere. It would be untrue to say that in those days the palaces of Gabriel struck me as being of greater beauty, or even of another epoch than the adjoining houses. I found more style, and should have supposed more antiquity if not in the Palais de l'Industrie at any rate in the Trocadéro. Plunged in a restless sleep, my adolescence embodied in one uniform vision the whole of the quarter through which it might be strolling, and I had never dreamed that there could be an eighteenth century building in the Rue Royale, just as I should have been astonished to learn that the Porte-Saint-Martin and the Porte-Saint-Denis, those glories of the age of Louis XIV, were not contemporary with the most recently built tenements in the sordid regions that bore their names. Once only one of Gabriel's palaces made me stop for more than a moment; that was because, night having fallen, its columns, dematerialised by the moonlight, had the appearance of having been cut out in pasteboard, and by recalling to me a scene in the operetta _Orphée aux Enfers_ gave me for the first time an impression of beauty. Meanwhile Gilberte never came to the Champs-Elysées. And yet it was imperative that I should see her, for I could not so much as remember what she was like. The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which shall give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternative if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and of despair, all these make our observation, in the beloved object's presence, too tremulous to be able to carry away a dear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which endeavours to learn from the visible aspect alone what lies behind it is over-indulgent to the thousand forms, to the changing fragrance, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we regard as fixed in one permanent position. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of her are always blurred. I did not rightly know how Gilberte's features were composed, save in the heavenly moments when she disclosed them to me; I could remember nothing but her smile. And not being able to see again that beloved face, despite every effort that I might make to recapture it, I would be disgusted to find, outlined in my memory with a maddening precision of detail, the meaningless, emphatic faces of the man with the wooden horses and of the barley-sugar woman; just as those who have lost a dear friend whom they never see even while they are asleep, are exasperated at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable creatures whom it is quite enough to have known in the waking world. In their inability to form any image of the object of their grief they are almost led to assert that they feel no grief. And I was not far from believing that, since I could not recall the features of Gilberte, I had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her. At length she returned to play there almost every day, setting before me fresh pleasures to desire, to demand of her for the morrow, indeed making my love for her every day, in this sense, a new love. But an incident was to change once again, and abruptly, the manner in which, at about two o'clock every afternoon, the problem of my love confronted me. Had M. Swann intercepted the letter that I had written to his daughter, or was Gilberte merely confessing to me long after the event, and so that I should be more prudent in future, a state of things already long established? As I was telling her how greatly I admired her father and mother, she assumed that vague air, full of reticence and kept secrets, which she invariably wore when anyone spoke to her of what she was going to do, her walks, drives, visits--then suddenly expressed it with: "You know, they can't abide you!" and, slipping from me like the Undine that she was, burst out laughing. Often her laughter, out of harmony with her words, seemed, as music seems, to be tracing an invisible surface on another plane. M. and Mme. Swann did not require Gilberte to give up playing with me, but they would have been just as well pleased, she thought, if we had never begun. They did not look upon our relations with a kindly eye; they believed me to be a young person of low moral standard and imagined that my influence over their daughter must be evil. This type of unscrupulous young man whom the Swanns thought that I resembled, I pictured him to myself as detesting the parents of the girl he loved, flattering them to their faces but, when he was alone with her, making fun of them, urging her on to disobey them and, when once he had completed his conquest, not allowing them even to set eyes on her again. With these characteristics (though they are never those under which the basest of scoundrels recognises himself) how vehemently did my heart contrast the sentiments that did indeed animate it with regard to Swann, so passionate, on the contrary, that I never doubted that, were he to have the least suspicion of them, he must repent of his condemnation of me as of a judicial error. All that I felt about him I made bold to express to him in a long letter which I entrusted to Gilberte, with the request that she would deliver it. She consented. Alas! so he saw in me an even greater impostor than I had feared; those sentiments which I had supposed myself to be portraying, in sixteen pages, with such amplitude of truth, so he had suspected them; in short, the letter that I had written him, as ardent and as sincere as the words that I had uttered to M. de Norpois, met with no more success. Gilberte told me next day, after taking me aside behind a clump of laurels, along a little path by which we sat down on a couple of chairs, that as he read my letter, which she had now brought back to me, her father had shrugged his shoulders, with: "All this means nothing; it only goes to prove how right I was." I, who knew the purity of my intentions, the goodness of my soul, was furious that my words should not even have impinged upon the surface of Swann's ridiculous error. For it was an error; of that I had then no doubt. I felt that I had described with such accuracy certain irrefutable characteristics of my generous sentiments that, if Swann had not at once reconstructed these from my indications, had not come to ask my forgiveness and to admit that he had been mistaken, it must be because these noble sentiments he had never himself experienced, which would make him incapable of understanding the existence of them in other people. Well, perhaps it was simply that Swann knew that generosity is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them. Perhaps he had recognised in the sympathy that I expressed for him simply an effect--and the strongest possible proof--of my love for Gilberte, by which, and not by any subordinate veneration of himself, my subsequent actions would be irresistibly controlled. I was unable to share his point of view, since I had not succeeded in abstracting my love from myself, in forcing it back into the common experience of humanity, and thus suffering, experimentally, its consequences; I was in despair. I was obliged to leave Gilberte for a moment; Françoise had called me. I must accompany her into a little pavilion covered in a green trellis, not unlike one of the disused toll-houses of old Paris, in which had recently been installed what in England they call a lavatory but in France, by an ill-informed piece of anglomania, "water-closets". The old, damp walls at the entrance, where I stood waiting for Françoise, emitted a chill and fusty smell which, relieving me at once of the anxieties that Swann's words, as reported by Gilberte, had just awakened in me, pervaded me with a pleasure not at all of the same character as other pleasures, which leave one more unstable than before, incapable of retaining them, of possessing them, but, on the contrary, with a consistent pleasure on which I could lean for support, delicious, soothing, rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and certain. I should have liked, as long ago in my walks along the Guermantes way, to endeavour to penetrate the charm of this impression which had seized hold of me, and, remaining there motionless, to interrogate this antiquated emanation which invited me not to enjoy the pleasure which it was offering me only as an "extra", but to descend into the underlying reality which it had not yet disclosed to me. But the tenant of the establishment, an elderly dame with painted cheeks and an auburn wig, was speaking to me. Françoise thought her "very well-to-do indeed." Her "missy" had married what Françoise called "a young man of family," which meant that he differed more, in her eyes, from a workman than, in Saint-Simon's, a duke did from a man "risen from the dregs of the people." No doubt the tenant, before entering upon her tenancy, had met with reverses. But Françoise was positive that she was a "marquise", and belonged to the Saint-Ferréol family. This "marquise" warned me not to stand outside in the cold, and even opened one of her doors for me, saying: "Won't you go inside for a minute? Look, here's a nice, clean one, and I shan't charge you anything." Perhaps she just made this offer in the spirit in which the young ladies at Gouache's, when we went in there to order something, used to offer me one of the sweets which they kept on the counter under glass bells, and which, alas, Mamma would never allow me to take; perhaps with less innocence, like an old florist whom Mamma used to have in to replenish her flower-stands, who rolled languishing eyes at me as she handed me a rose. In any event, if the "marquise" had a weakness for little boys, when she threw open to them the hypogean doors of those cubicles of stone in which men crouch like sphinxes, she must have been moved to that generosity less by the hope of corrupting them than by the pleasure which all of us feel in displaying a needless prodigality to those whom we love, for I have never seen her with any other visitor except an old park-keeper. A moment later I said good-bye to the "marquise", and went out accompanied by Françoise, whom I left to return to Gilberte. I caught sight of her at once, on a chair, behind the clump of laurels. She was there so as not to be seen by her friends: they were playing at hide-and-seek. I went and sat down by her side. She had on a flat cap which drooped forwards over her eyes, giving her the same "underhand", brooding, crafty look which I had remarked in her that first time at Combray. I asked her if there was not some way for me to have it out with her father, face to face. Gilberte said that she had suggested that to him, but that he had not thought it of any use. "Look," she went on, "don't go away without your letter; I must run along to the others, as they haven't caught me." Had Swann appeared on the scene then before I had recovered it, this letter, by the sincerity of which I felt that he had been so unreasonable in not letting himself be convinced, perhaps he would have seen that it was he who had been in the right. For as I approached Gilberte, who, leaning back in her chair, told me to take the letter but did not hold it out to me, I felt myself so irresistibly attracted by her body that I said to her: "Look! You try to stop me from getting it; we'll see which is the stronger." She thrust it behind her back; I put my arms round her neck, raising the plaits of hair which she wore over her shoulders, either because she was still of an age for that or because her mother chose to make her look a child for a little longer so that she herself might still seem young; and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her towards me, she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, as it were a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse; immediately I snatched the letter from her. Whereupon Gilberte said, good-naturedly: "You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling for a little." Perhaps she was dimly conscious that my game had had another object than that which I had avowed, but too dimly to have been able to see that I had attained it. And I, who was afraid that she had seen (and a slight recoil, as though of offended modesty which she made and checked a moment later made me think that my fear had not been unfounded), agreed to go on wrestling, lest she should suppose that I had indeed no other object than that, after which I wished only to sit quietly by her side. On my way home I perceived, I suddenly recollected the impression, concealed from me until then, towards which, without letting me distinguish or recognise it, the cold, almost sooty smell of the trellised pavilion had borne me. It was that of my uncle Adolphe's little sitting-room at Combray, which had indeed exhaled the same odour of humidity. But I could not understand, and I postponed the attempt to discover why the recollection of so trivial an impression had given me so keen a happiness. It struck me, however, that I did indeed deserve the contempt of M. de Norpois; I had preferred, hitherto, to all other writers, one whom he styled a mere "flute-player" and a positive rapture had been conveyed to me, not by any important idea, but by a mouldy smell. For some time past, in certain households, the name of the Champs-Elysées, if a visitor mentioned it, would be greeted by the mother of the family with that air of contempt which mothers keep for a physician of established reputation whom they have (or so they make out) seen make too many false diagnoses to have any faith left in him; people insisted that these gardens were not good for children, that they knew of more than one sore throat, more than one case of measles and any number of feverish chills for which the Champs must be held responsible. Without venturing openly to doubt the maternal affection of Mamma, who continued to let me play there, several of her friends deplored her inability to see what was as plain as daylight. Neurotic subjects are perhaps less addicted than any, despite the time-honoured phrase, to "listening to their insides": they can hear so many things going on inside themselves, by which they realise later that they did wrong to let themselves be alarmed, that they end by paying no attention to any of them. Their nervous systems have so often cried out to them for help, as though from some serious malady, when it was merely because snow was coming, or because they had to change their rooms, that they have acquired the habit of paying no more heed to these warnings than a soldier who in the heat of battle perceives them so little that he is capable, although dying, of carrying on for some days still the life of a man in perfect health. One morning, bearing arranged within me all my regular disabilities, from whose constant, internal circulation I kept my mind turned as resolutely away as from the circulation of my blood, I had come running into the dining-room where my parents were already at table, and--having assured myself, as usual, that to feel cold may mean not that one ought to warm oneself but that, for instance, one has received a scolding, and not to feel hungry that it is going to rain, and not that one ought not to eat anything--had taken my place between them when, in the act of swallowing the first mouthful of a particularly tempting cutlet, a nausea, a giddiness stopped me, the feverish reaction of a malady that had already begun, the symptoms of which had been masked, retarded by the ice of my indifference, but which obstinately refused the nourishment that I was not in a fit state to absorb. Then, at the same moment, the thought that they would stop me from going out if they saw that I was unwell gave me, as the instinct of self-preservation gives a wounded man, the strength to crawl to my own room, where I found that I had a temperature of 104, and then to get ready to go to the Champs-Elysées. Through the languid and vulnerable shell which encased them, my eager thoughts were urging me towards, were clamouring for the soothing delight of a game of prisoner's base with Gilberte, and an hour later, barely able to keep on my feet, but happy in being by her side, I had still the strength to enjoy it. Françoise, on our return, declared that I had been "taken bad", that I must have caught a "hot and cold", while the doctor, who was called in at once, declared that he "preferred" the "severity", the "virulence" of the rush of fever which accompanied my congestion of the lungs, and would be no more than "a fire of straw", to other forms, more "insidious" and "septic". For some time now I had been liable to choking fits, and our doctor, braving the disapproval of my grandmother, who could see me already dying a drunkard's death, had recommended me to take, as well as the caffeine which had been prescribed to help me to breathe, beer, champagne or brandy when I felt an attack coming. These attacks would subside, he told me, in the "euphoria" brought about by the alcohol. I was often obliged, so that my grandmother should allow them to give it to me, instead of dissembling, almost to make a display of my state of suffocation. On the other hand, as soon as I felt an attack coming, never being quite certain what proportions it would assume, I would grow distressed at the thought of my grandmother's anxiety, of which I was far more afraid than of my own sufferings. But at the same time my body, either because it was too weak to keep those sufferings secret, or because it feared lest, in their ignorance of the imminent disaster, people might demand of me some exertion which it would have found impossible or dangerous, gave me the need to warn my grandmother of my attacks with a punctiliousness into which I finally put a sort of physiological scruple. Did I perceive in myself a disturbing symptom which I had not previously observed, my body was in distress so long as I had not communicated it to my grandmother. Did she pretend to pay no attention, it made me insist. Sometimes I went too far; and that dear face, which was no longer able always to control its emotion as in the past, would allow an expression of pity to appear, a painful contraction. Then my heart was wrung by the sight of her grief; as if my kisses had had power to expel that grief, as if my affection could give my grandmother as much joy as my recovery, I flung myself into her arms. And its scruples being at the same time calmed by the certainty that she now knew the discomfort that I felt, my body offered no opposition to my reassuring her. I protested that this discomfort had been nothing, that I was in no sense to be pitied, that she might be quite sure that I was now happy; my body had wished to secure exactly the amount of pity that it deserved, and, provided that someone knew that it 'had a pain' in its right side, it could see no harm in my declaring that this pain was of no consequence and was not an obstacle to my happiness; for my body did not pride itself on its philosophy; that was outside its province. Almost every day during my convalescence I passed through these crises of suffocation. One evening, after my grandmother had left me comparatively well, she returned to my room very late and, seeing me struggling for breath, "Oh, my poor boy," she exclaimed, her face quivering with sympathy, "you are in dreadful pain." She left me at once; I heard the outer gate open, and in a little while she came back with some brandy which she had gone out to buy, since there was none in the house. Presently I began to feel better. My grandmother, who was rather flushed, seemed "put out" about something, and her eyes had a look of weariness and dejection. "I shall leave you alone now, and let you get the good of this improvement," she said, rising suddenly to go. I detained her, however, for a kiss, and could feel on her cold cheek something moist, but did not know whether it was the dampness of the night air through which she had just passed. Next day, she did not come to my room until the evening, having had, she told me, to go out. I considered that this shewed a surprising indifference to my welfare, and I had to restrain myself so as not to reproach her with it. As my chokings had persisted long after any congestion remained that could account for them, my parents asked for a consultation with Professor Cottard. It is not enough that a physician who is called in to treat cases of this sort should be learned. Brought face to face with symptoms which may or may not be those of three or four different complaints, it is in the long run his instinct, his eye that must decide with which, despite the more or less similar appearance of them all, he has to deal. This mysterious gift does not imply any superiority in the other departments of the intellect, and a creature of the utmost vulgarity, who admires the worst pictures, the worst music, in whose mind there is nothing out of the common, may perfectly well possess it. In my case, what was physically evident might equally well have been due to nervous spasms, to the first stages of tuberculosis, to asthma, to a toxi-alimentary dyspnoea with renal insufficiency, to chronic bronchitis, or to a complex state into which more than one of these factors entered. Now, nervous spasms required to be treated firmly, and discouraged, tuberculosis with infinite care and with a "feeding-up" process which would have been bad for an arthritic condition such as asthma, and might indeed have been dangerous in a case of toxi-alimentary dyspnoea, this last calling for a strict diet which, in return, would be fatal to a tuberculous patient. But Cottard's hesitations were brief and his prescriptions imperious. "Purges; violent and drastic purges; milk for some days, nothing but milk. No meat. No alcohol." My mother murmured that I needed, all the same, to be "built up", that my nerves were already weak, that drenching me like a horse and restricting my diet would make me worse. I could see in Cottard's eyes, as uneasy as though he were afraid of missing a train, that he was asking himself whether he had not allowed his natural good-humour to appear. He was trying to think whether he had remembered to put on his mask of coldness, as one looks for a mirror to see whether one has not forgotten to tie one's tie. In his uncertainty, and, so as, whatever he had done, to put things right, he replied brutally: "I am not in the habit of repeating my instructions. Give me a pen. Now remember, milk! Later on, when we have got the crises and the agrypnia by the throat, I should like you to take a little clear soup, and then a little broth, but always with milk; _au lait!_ You'll enjoy that, since Spain is all the rage just now; _ollé, ollé!_" His pupils knew this joke well, for he made it at the hospital whenever he had to put a heart or liver case on a milk diet. "After that, you will gradually return to your normal life. But whenever there is any coughing or choking--purges, injections, bed, milk!" He listened with icy calm, and without uttering a word, to my mother's final objections, and as he left us without having condescended to explain the reasons for this course of treatment, my parents concluded that it had no bearing on my case, and would weaken me to no purpose, and so they did not make me try it. Naturally they sought to conceal their disobedience from the Professor, and to succeed in this avoided all the houses in which he was likely to be found. Then, as my health became worse, they decided to make me follow out Cottard's prescriptions to the letter; in three days my "rattle" and cough had ceased, I could breathe freely. Whereupon we realised that Cottard, while finding, as he told us later on, that I was distinctly asthmatic, and still more inclined to "imagine things", had seen that what was really the matter with me at the moment was intoxication, and that by loosening my liver and washing out my kidneys he would get rid of the congestion of my bronchial tubes and thus give me back my breath, my sleep and my strength. And we realised that this imbecile was a clinical genius. At last I was able to get up. But they spoke of not letting me go any more to the Champs-Elysées. They said that it was because the air there was bad; but I felt sure that this was only a pretext so that I should not see Mlle. Swann, and I forced myself to repeat the name of Gilberte all the time, like the native tongue which peoples in captivity endeavour to preserve among themselves so as not to forget the land that they will never see again. Sometimes my mother would stroke my forehead with her hand, saying: "So little boys don't tell Mamma their troubles any more?" And Françoise used to come up to me every day with: "What a face, to be sure! If you could just see yourself! Anyone would think there was a corpse in the house." It is true that, if I had simply had a cold in the head, Françoise would have assumed the same funereal air. These lamentations pertained rather to her "class" than to the state of my health. I could not at the time discover whether this pessimism was due to sorrow or to satisfaction. I decided provisionally that it was social and professional. One day, after the postman had called, my mother laid a letter upon my bed. I opened it carelessly, since it could not bear the one signature that would have made me happy, the name of Gilberte, with whom I had no relations outside the Champs-Elysées. And lo, at the foot of the page, embossed with a silver seal representing a man's head in a helmet, and under him a scroll with the device _Per viam rectam_, beneath a letter written in a large and flowing hand, in which almost every word appeared to be underlined, simply because the crosses of the 't's ran not across but over them, and so drew a line beneath the corresponding letters of the word above, it was indeed Gilberte's signature and nothing else that I saw. But because I knew that to be impossible upon a letter addressed to myself, the sight of it, unaccompanied by any belief in it, gave me no pleasure. For a moment it merely struck an impression of unreality on everything round about me. With lightning rapidity the impossible signature danced about my bed, the fireplace, the four walls. I saw everything sway, as one does when one falls from a horse, and I asked myself whether there was not an existence altogether different from the one I knew, in direct contradiction of it, but itself the true existence, which, being suddenly revealed to me, filled me with that hesitation which sculptors, in representing the Last Judgment, have given to the awakening dead who find themselves at the gates of the next world. "My dear Friend," said the letter, "I hear that you have been very ill and have given up going to the Champs-Elysées. I hardly ever go there either because there has been such an enormous lot of illness. But I'm having my friends to tea here every Monday and Friday. Mamma asks me to tell you that it will be a great pleasure to us all if you will come too, as soon as you are well again, and we can have some more nice talks here, just like the Champs-Elysées. Good-bye, dear friend; I hope that your parents will allow you to come to tea very often. With all my kindest regards. GILBERTE." While I was reading these words, my nervous system was receiving, with admirable promptitude, the news that a piece of great good fortune had befallen me. But my mind, that is to say myself, and in fact the party principally concerned, was still in ignorance. Such good fortune, coming from Gilberte, was a thing of which I had never ceased to dream; a thing wholly in my mind, it was, as Leonardo says of painting, _cosa mentale._ Now, a sheet of paper covered with writing is not a thing that the mind assimilates at once. But as soon as I had finished reading the letter, I thought of it, it became an object of my dreams, became, it also, _cosa mentale_, and I loved it so much already that every few minutes I must read it, kiss it again. Then at last I was conscious of my happiness. Life is strewn with these miracles, for which people who are in love can always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just as, when I was little and went first to the seaside, so as to give me some pleasure in bathing, which I detested because it took away my breath, she used secretly to hand to the man who was to "dip" me marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I believed that I myself had discovered lying at the bottom of the sea. However, with every occurrence which, in our life and among its contrasted situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand it, since in so far as these are inexorable, as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws. When a multi-millionaire--who for all his millions is quite a charming person--sent packing by a poor and unattractive woman with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in his desperation, all the resources of wealth, and brings every worldly influence to bear without succeeding in making her take him back, it is wiser for him, in the face of the implacable obstinacy of his mistress, to suppose that Fate intends to crush him, and to make him die of an affection of the heart, than to seek any logical explanation. These obstacles, against which lovers have to contend, and which their imagination, over-excited by suffering, seeks in vain to analyse, are contained, as often as not, in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot bring back to themselves, in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her, the fears suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the kind of pleasures which, at the moment, she is demanding of life, pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover's wealth can procure for her. In any event, the lover is scarcely in a position to discover the nature of these obstacles, which her womanly cunning hides from him and his own judgment, falsified by love, prevents him from estimating exactly. They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor succeeds in reducing, but without having traced them to their source. Like them these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they last, as a rule, longer than love itself. And as that is not a disinterested passion, the lover who is no longer in love does not seek to know why the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in love refused obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her. Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe, when love is in question, envelops just as frequently the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had come to me with Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few solutions that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that every satisfaction which we can bring to it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion that we are healed. So far as concerns this letter, at the foot of which Françoise declined to recognise Gilberte's name, because the elaborate capital 'G' leaning against the undotted 'i' looked more like an 'A' while the final syllable was indefinitely prolonged by a waving flourish, if we persist in looking for a rational explanation of the sudden reversal of her attitude towards me which it indicated, and which made me so radiantly happy, we may perhaps find that I was to some extent indebted for it to an incident which I should have supposed, on the contrary, to be calculated to ruin me for ever in the sight of the Swann family. A short while back, Bloch had come to see me at a time when Professor Cottard, whom, now that I was following his instructions, we were again calling in, happened to be in my room. As his examination of me was over, and he was sitting with me simply as a visitor because my parents had invited him to stay to dinner, Bloch was allowed to come in. While we were all talking, Bloch having mentioned that he had heard it said that Mme. Swann was very fond of me, by a lady with whom he had been dining the day before, who was herself very intimate with Mme. Swann, I should have liked to reply that he was most certainly mistaken, and to establish the fact (from the same scruple of conscience that had made me proclaim it to M. de Norpois, and for fear of Mme. Swann's taking me for a liar) that I did not know her and had never spoken to her. But I had not the courage to correct Bloch's mistake, because I could see quite well that it was deliberate, and that, if he invented something that Mme. Swann could not possibly have said, it was simply to let us know (what he considered flattering to himself, and was not true either) that he had been dining with one of that lady's friends. And so it fell out that, whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know but would very much like to know Mme. Swann, had taken great care to avoid speaking to her about me, Cottard, who was her doctor also, having gathered from what he had heard Bloch say that she knew me quite well and thought highly of me, concluded that to remark, when next he saw her, that I was a charming young fellow and a great friend of his could not be of the smallest use to me and would be of advantage to himself, two reasons which made him decide to speak of me to Odette whenever an opportunity arose. Thus at length I found my way into that abode from which was wafted even on to the staircase the scent that Mme. Swann used, though it was embalmed far more sweetly still by the peculiar, disturbing charm that emanated from the life of Gilberte. The implacable porter, transformed into a benevolent Eumenid, adopted the custom, when I asked him if I might go upstairs, of indicating to me, by raising his cap with a propitious hand, that he gave ear to my prayer. Those windows which, seen from outside, used to interpose between me and the treasures within, which were not intended for me, a polished, distant and superficial stare, which seemed to me the very stare of the Swanns themselves, it fell to my lot, when in the warm weather I had spent a whole afternoon with Gilberte in her room, to open them myself, so as to let in a little air, and even to lean over the sill of one of them by her side, if it was her mothers "at home" day, to watch the visitors arrive who would often, raising their heads as they stepped out of their carriages, greet me with a wave of the hand, taking me for some nephew of their hostess. At such moments Gilberte's plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their constructed tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, even infinitely minute, what celestial herbary would I not have given as a reliquary. But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have their photograph, how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers traced by Vinci's pencil! To acquire one of these, I stooped--with friends of the Swanns, and even with photographers--to servilities which did not procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely tiresome people. Gilberte's parents, who for so long had prevented me from seeing her, now--when I entered the dark hall in which hovered perpetually, more formidable and more to be desired than, at Versailles of old, the apparition of the King, the possibility of my encountering them, in which too, invariably, after butting into an enormous hat-stand with seven branches, like the Candlestick in Holy Writ, I would begin bowing confusedly before a footman, seated among the skirts of his long grey coat upon the wood-box, whom in the dim light I had mistaken for Mme. Swann--Gilberte's parents, if one of them happened to be passing at the moment of my arrival, so far from seeming annoyed would come and shake hands with a smile, and say: "How d'e do?" (They both pronounced it in the same clipped way, which, you may well imagine, once I was back at home, I made an incessant and delightful practice of copying.) "Does Gilberte know you're here? She does? Then I'll leave you to her." Better still, the tea-parties themselves to which Gilberte invited her friends, parties which for so long had seemed to me the most insurmountable of the barriers heaped up between her and myself, became now an opportunity for uniting us of which she would inform me in a few lines, written (because I was still a comparative stranger) upon sheets that were always different. One was adorned with a poodle embossed in blue, above a fantastic inscription in English with an exclamation mark after it; another was stamped with an anchor, or with the monogram G. S. preposterously elongated in a rectangle which ran from top to bottom of the page, or else with the name Gilberte, now traced across one corner in letters of gold which imitated my friend's signature and ended in a flourish, beneath an open umbrella printed in black, now enclosed in a monogram in the shape of a Chinaman's hat, which contained all the letters of the word in capitals without its being possible to make out a single one of them. At last, as the series of different writing-papers which Gilberte possessed, numerous as it might be, was not unlimited, after a certain number of weeks I saw reappear the sheet that bore (like the first letter she had written me) the motto _Per viam rectam_, and over it the man's head in a helmet, set in a medallion of tarnished silver. And each of them was chosen, on one day rather than another, by virtue of a certain ritual, as I then supposed, but more probably, as I now think, because she tried to remember which of them she had already used, so as never to send the same one twice to any of her correspondents, of those at least whom she took special pains to please, save at the longest possible intervals. As, on account of the different times of their lessons, some of the friends whom Gilberte used to invite to her parties were obliged to leave just as the rest were arriving, while I was still on the stairs I could hear escaping from the hall a murmur of voices which, such was the emotion aroused in me by the imposing ceremony in which I was to take part, long before I had reached the landing, broke all the bonds that still held me to my past life, so that I did not even remember that I was to take off my muffler as soon as I felt too hot, and to keep an eye on the clock so as not to be late in getting home. That staircase, besides, all of wood, as they were built about that time in certain houses, in keeping with that Henri II style which had for so long been Odette's ideal though she was shortly to lose interest in it, and furnished with a placard, to which there was no equivalent at home, on which one read the words: "NOTICE. The lift must not be taken downstairs", seemed to me a thing so marvellous that I told my parents that it was an ancient staircase brought from ever so far away by M. Swann. My regard for the truth was so great that I should not have hesitated to give them this information even if I had known it to be false, for it alone could enable them to feel for the dignity of the Swanns' staircase the same respect that I felt myself. It was just as, when one is talking to some ignorant person who cannot understand in what the genius of a great physician consists, it is as well not to admit that he does not know how to cure a cold in the head. But since I had no power of observation, since, as a general rule, I never knew either the name or the nature of things that were before my eyes, and could understand only that when they were connected with the Swanns they must be extraordinary, I was by no means certain that in notifying my parents of the artistic value and remote origin of the staircase I was guilty of falsehood. It did not seem certain; but it must have seemed probable, for I felt myself turn very red when my father interrupted me with: "I know those houses; I have been in one; they are all alike; Swann just has several floors in one; it was Berlier built them all." He added that he had thought of taking a flat in one of them, but that he had changed his mind, finding that they were not conveniently arranged, and that the landings were too dark. So he said; but I felt instinctively that my mind must make the sacrifices necessary to the glory of the Swanns and to my own happiness, and by a stroke of internal authority, in spite of what I had just heard, I banished for ever from my memory, as a good Catholic banishes Renan's _Vie de Jésus_, the destroying thought that their house was just an ordinary flat in which we ourselves might have been living. Meanwhile on those tea-party days, pulling myself up the staircase step by step, reason and memory already cast off like outer garments, and myself no more now than the sport of the basest reflexes, I would arrive in the zone in which the scent of Mme. Swann greeted my nostrils. I felt that I could already behold the majesty of the chocolate cake, encircled by plates heaped with little cakes, and by tiny napkins of grey damask with figures on them, as required by convention but peculiar to the Swanns. But this unalterable and governed whole seemed, like Kant's necessary universe, to depend on a supreme act of free-will. For when we were all together in Gilberte's little sitting-room, suddenly she would look at the clock and exclaim: "I say! It's getting a long time since luncheon, and we aren't having dinner till eight. I feel as if I could eat something. What do you say?" And she would make us go into the dining-room, as sombre as the interior of an Asiatic Temple painted by Rembrandt, in which an architectural cake, as gracious and sociable as it was imposing, seemed to be enthroned there in any event, in case the fancy seized Gilberte to discrown it of its chocolate battlements and to hew down the steep brown slopes of its ramparts, baked in the oven like the bastions of the palace of Darius. Better still, in proceeding to the demolition of that Babylonitish pastry, Gilberte did not consider only her own hunger; she inquired also after mine, while she extracted for me from the crumbling monument a whole glazed slab jewelled with scarlet fruits, in the oriental style. She asked me even at what o'clock my parents were dining, as if I still knew, as if the disturbance that governed me had allowed to persist the sensation of satiety or of hunger, the notion of dinner or the picture of my family in my empty memory and paralysed stomach. Alas, its paralysis was but momentary. The cakes that I took without noticing them, a time would come when I should have to digest them. But that time was still remote. Meanwhile Gilberte was making "my" tea. I went on drinking it indefinitely, whereas a single cup would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. Which explains why my mother used always to say: "What a nuisance it is; he can never go to the Swanns' without coming home ill." But was I aware even, when I was at the Swanns', that it was tea that I was drinking? Had I known, I should have taken it just the same, for even supposing that I had recovered for a moment the sense of the present, that would not have restored to me the memory of the past or the apprehension of the future. My imagination was incapable of reaching to the distant time in which I might have the idea of going to bed, and the need to sleep. Gilberte's girl friends were not all plunged in that state of intoxication in which it is impossible to make up one's mind. Some of them refused tea! Then Gilberte would say, using a phrase highly fashionable that I year: "I can see I'm not having much of a success with my tea!" And to destroy more completely any idea of ceremony, she would disarrange the chairs that were drawn up round the table, with: "We look just like a wedding breakfast. Good lord, what fools servants are!" She nibbled her cake, perched sideways upon a cross-legged seat placed at an angle to the table. And then, just as though she could have had all those cakes at her disposal without having first asked leave of her mother, when Mme. Swann, whose "day" coincided as a rule with Gilberte's tea-parties, had shewn one of her visitors to the door, and came sweeping in, a moment later, dressed sometimes in blue velvet, more often in a black satin gown draped with white lace, she would say with an air of astonishment: "I say, that looks good, what you've got there. It makes me quite hungry to see you all eating cake." "But, Mamma, do! We invite you!" Gilberte would answer. "Thank you, no, my precious; what would my visitors say? I've still got Mme. Trombert and Mme. Cottard and Mme. Bontemps; you know dear Mme. Bontemps never pays very short visits, and she has only just come. What would all those good people say if I never went back to them? If no one else calls, I'll come in again and have a chat with you (which will be far more amusing) after they've all gone. I really think I've earned a little rest; I have had forty-five different people to-day, and forty-two of them told me about Gérôme's picture! But you must come along one of these days," she turned to me, "and take 'your' tea with Gilberte. She will make it for you just as you like it, as you have it in your own little 'studio'," she went on, flying off to her visitors, as if it had been something as familiar to me as my own habits (such as the habit that I should have had of taking tea, had I ever taken it; as for my "studio", I was uncertain whether I had one or not) that I had come to seek in this mysterious world. "When can you come? To-morrow? We will make you 'toast' every bit as good, as you get at Colombin's. No? You are horrid!"--for, since she also had begun to form a salon, she had borrowed Mme. Verdurin's mannerisms, and notably her tone of petulant autocracy. "Toast" being as incomprehensible to me as "Colombin's", this further promise could not add to my temptation. It will appear stranger still, now that everyone uses such expressions--and perhaps even at Combray they are creeping in--that I had not at first understood of whom Mme. Swann was speaking when I heard her sing the praises of our old "nurse". I did not know any English; I gathered, however, as she went on that the word was intended to denote Françoise. I who, in the Champs-Elysées, had been so terrified of the bad impression that she must make, I now learned from Mme. Swann that it was all the things that Gilberte had told them about my "nurse" that had attracted her husband and her to me. "One feels that she is so devoted to you; she must be nice!" (At once my opinion of Françoise was diametrically changed. By the same token, to have a governess equipped with a waterproof and a feather in her hat no longer appeared quite so essential.) Finally I learned from some words which Mme. Swann let fall with regard to Mme. Blatin (whose good nature she recognised but dreaded her visits) that personal relations with that lady would have been of less value to me than I had supposed, and would not in any way have improved my standing with the Swanns. If I had now begun to explore, with tremors of reverence and joy the faery domain which, against all probability, had opened to me its hitherto locked approaches, this was still only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte. The kingdom into which I was received was itself contained within another, more mysterious still, in which Swann and his wife led their supernatural existence and towards which they made their way, after taking my hand in theirs, when they crossed the hall at the same moment as myself but in the other direction. But soon I was to penetrate also to the heart of the Sanctuary. For instance, Gilberte might be out when I called, but M. or Mme. Swann was at home. They would ask who had rung, and on being told that it was myself would send out to ask me to come in for a moment and talk to them, desiring me to use in one way or another, and with this or that object in view, my influence over their daughter. I reminded myself of that letter, so complete, so convincing, which I had written to Swann only the other day, and which he had not deigned even to acknowledge. I marvelled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which, in the sequel, life, without one's so much as knowing what steps it has taken, so easily unravels. My new position as the friend of Gilberte, endowed with an excellent influence over her, entitling me now to enjoy the same favours as if, having had as a companion at some school where they had always put me at the head of my class the son of a king, I had owed to that accident the right of informal entry into the palace and to audiences in the throne-room, Swann, with an infinite benevolence and as though he were not overburdened with glorious occupations, would make me go into his library and there let me for an hour on end respond in stammered monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of courage, to utterances of which my emotion prevented me from understanding a single word; would shew me works of art and books which he thought likely to interest me, things as to which I had no doubt, before seeing them, that they infinitely surpassed in beauty anything that the Louvre possessed or the National Library, but at which I found it impossible to look. At such moments I should have been grateful to Swann's butler, had he demanded from me my watch, my tie-pin, my boots, and made me sign a deed acknowledging him as my heir: in the admirable words of a popular expression of which, as of the most famous epics, we do not know who was the author, although, like those epics, and with all deference to Wolff and his theory, it most certainly had an author, one of those inventive, modest souls such as we come across every year, who light upon such gems as "putting a name to a face", though their own names they never let us learn, I did not know what I was doing. All the greater was my astonishment, when my visit was prolonged, at finding to what a zero of realisation, to what an absence of happy ending those hours spent in the enchanted dwelling led me. But my disappointment arose neither from the inadequacy of the works of art that were shewn to me nor from the impossibility of fixing upon them my distracted gaze. For it was not the intrinsic beauty of the objects themselves that made it miraculous for me to be sitting in Swann's library, it was the attachment to those objects--which might have been the ugliest in the world--of the particular feeling, melancholy and voluptuous, which I had for so many years localised in that room and which still impregnated it; similarly the multitude of mirrors, of silver-backed brushes, of altars to Saint Anthony of Padua, carved and painted by the most eminent artists, her friends, counted for nothing in the feeling of my own unworthiness and of her regal benevolence which was aroused in me when Mme. Swann received me for a moment in her own room, in which three beautiful and impressive creatures, her principal and second and third maids, smilingly prepared for her the most marvellous toilets, and towards which, on the order conveyed to me by the footman in knee-breeches that Madame wished to say a few words to me, I would make my way along the tortuous path of a corridor all embalmed, far and near, by the precious essences which exhaled without ceasing from her dressing-room a fragrance exquisitely sweet. When Mme. Swann had returned to her visitors, we could still hear her talking and laughing, for even with only two people in the room, and as though she had to cope with all the "good friends" at once, she would raise her voice, ejaculate her words, as she had so often in the "little clan" heard its "Mistress" do, at the moments when she "led the conversation". The expressions which we have borrowed from other people being those which, for a time at least, we are fondest of using, Mme. Swann used to select at one time those which she had learned from distinguished people whom her husband had not managed to prevent her from getting to know (it was from them that she derived the mannerism which consists in suppressing the article or demonstrative pronoun, in French, before an adjective qualifying a person's name), at another time others more plebeian (such as "It's a mere nothing!" the favourite expression of one of her friends), and used to make room for them in all the stories which, by a habit formed among the "little clan", she loved to tell about people. She would follow these up automatically with, "I do love that story!" or "Do admit, it's a very _good_ story!" which came to her, through her husband, from the Guermantes, whom she did not know. Mme. Swann had left the dining-room, but her husband, who had just returned home, made his appearance among us in turn. "Do you know if your mother is alone, Gilberte?" "No, Papa, she has still some people." "What, still? At seven o'clock! It's appalling! The poor woman must be absolutely dead. It's odious." (At home I had always heard the first syllable of this word pronounced with a long 'o', like "ode", but M. and Mme. Swann made it short, as in "odd".) "Just think of it; ever since two o'clock this afternoon!" he went on, turning to me. "And Camille tells me that between four and five he let in at least a dozen people. Did I say a dozen? I believe he told me fourteen. No, a dozen; I don't remember. When I came home I had quite forgotten it was her 'day', and when I saw all those carriages outside the door I thought there must be a wedding in the house. And just now, while I've been in the library for a minute, the bell has never stopped ringing; upon my word, it's given me quite a headache. And are there a lot of them in there still?" "No; only two." "Who are they, do you know?" "Mme. Cottard and Mme. Bontemps." "Oh! the wife of the Chief Secretary to the Minister of Posts." "I know her husband's a clerk in some Ministry or other, but I don't know what he does." Gilberte assumed a babyish manner. "What's that? You silly child, you talk as if you were two years old. What do you mean; 'a clerk in some Ministry or other' indeed! He is nothing less than Chief Secretary, chief of the whole show, and what's more--what on earth am I thinking of? Upon my word, I'm getting as stupid as yourself; he is not the Chief Secretary, he's the Permanent Secretary." "I don't know, I'm sure; does that mean a lot, being Permanent Secretary?" answered Gilberte, who never let slip an opportunity of displaying her own indifference to anything that gave her parents cause for vanity. (She may, of course, have considered that she only enhanced the brilliance of such an acquaintance by not seeming to attach any undue importance to it.) "I should think it did 'mean a lot'!" exclaimed Swann, who preferred to this modesty, which might have left me in doubt, a more explicit mode of speech. "Why it means simply that he's the first man after the Minister. In fact, he's more important than the Minister, because it is he that does all the work. Besides, it appears that he has immense capacity, a man quite of the first rank, a most distinguished individual. He's an Officer of the Legion of Honour. A delightful man, he is, and very good-looking too." (This man's wife, incidentally, had married him against everyone's wishes and advice because he was a c charming creature'. He had, what may be sufficient to constitute a rare and delicate whole, a fair, silky beard, good features, a nasal voice, powerful lungs and a glass eye.) "I may tell you," he added, turning again to me, "that I am greatly amused to see that lot serving in the present Government, because they are Bontemps of the Bontemps-Chenut family, typical old-fashioned middle class people, reactionary, clerical, tremendously strait-laced. Your grandfather knew quite well--at least by name and by sight he must have known old Chenut, the father, who never tipped the cabmen more than a ha'penny, though he was a rich enough man for those days, and the Baron Bréau-Chenut. All their money went in the Union Générale smash--you're too young to remember that, of course--and, gad! they've had to get it back as best they could." "He's the uncle of a little girl who used to come to my lessons, in a class a long way below mine, the famous 'Albertine'. She's certain to be dreadfully 'fast' when she's older, but just now she's the quaintest spectacle." "She is amazing, this daughter of mine. She knows everyone." "I don't know her. I only used to see her going about, and hear them calling 'Albertine' here, and 'Albertine' there. But I do know Mme. Bontemps, and I don't like her much either." "You are quite wrong; she is charming, pretty, intelligent. In fact, she's quite clever. I shall go in and say how d'ye do to her, and ask her if her husband thinks we're going to have war, and whether we can rely on King Theodosius. He's bound to know, don't you think, since he's in the counsels of the gods." It was not thus that Swann used to talk in days gone by; but which of us cannot call to mind some royal princess of limited intelligence who let herself be carried off by a footman, and then, ten years later, tried to get back into society, and found that people were not very willing to call upon her; have we not found her spontaneously adopting the language of all the old bores, and, when we referred to some duchess who was at the height of fashion, heard her say: "She came to see me only yesterday," or "I live a very quiet life." So that it is superfluous to make a study of manners, since we can deduce them all from psychological laws. The Swanns shared this eccentricity of people who have not many friends; a visit, an invitation, a mere friendly word from some one ever so little prominent were for them events to which they aspired to give full publicity. If bad luck would have it that the Verdurins were in London when Odette gave a rather smart dinner-party, arrangements were made by which some common friend was to "cable" a report to them across the Channel. Even the complimentary letters and telegrams received by Odette the Swanns were incapable of keeping to themselves. They spoke of them to their friends, passed them from hand to hand. Thus the Swanns' drawing-room reminded one of a seaside hotel where telegrams containing the latest news are posted up on a board. Still, people who had known the old Swann not merely Outside society, as I had known him, but in society, in that Guermantes set which, with certain concessions to Highnesses and Duchesses, was almost infinitely exacting in the matter of wit and charm, from which banishment was sternly decreed for men of real eminence whom its members found boring or vulgar,--such people might have been astonished to observe that their old Swann had ceased to be not only discreet when he spoke of his acquaintance, but difficult when he was called upon to enlarge it. How was it that Mme. Bontemps, so common, so ill-natured, failed to exasperate him? How could he possibly describe her as attractive? The memory of the Guermantes set must, one would suppose, have prevented him; as a matter of fact it encouraged him. There was certainly among the Guermantes, as compared with the great majority of groups in society, taste, indeed a refined taste, but also a snobbishness from which there arose the possibility of a momentary interruption in the exercise of that taste. If it were a question of some one who was not indispensable to their circle, of a Minister for Foreign Affairs, a Republican and inclined to be pompous, or of an Academician who talked too much, their taste would be brought to bear heavily against him, Swann would condole with Mme. de Guermantes on having had to sit next to such people at dinner at one of the Embassies, and they would a thousand times rather have a man of fashion, that is to say a man of the Guermantes kind, good for nothing, but endowed with the wit of the Guermantes, some one who was "of the same chapel" as themselves. Only, a Grand Duchess, a Princess of the Blood, should she dine often with Mme. de Guermantes, would soon find herself enrolled in that chapel also, without having any right to be there, without being at all so endowed. But with the simplicity of people in society, from the moment they had her in their houses they went out of their way to find her attractive, since they were unable to say that it was because she was attractive that they invited her. Swann, coming to the rescue of Mme. de Guermantes, would say to her after the Highness had gone: "After all, she's not such a bad woman; really, she has quite a sense of the comic. I don't suppose for a moment that she has mastered the _Critique of Pure Reason_; still, she is not unattractive." "Oh, I do so entirely agree with you!" the Duchess would respond. "Besides, she was a little frightened of us all; you will see that she can be charming." "She is certainly a great deal less devastating than Mme. X----" (the wife of the talkative Academician, and herself a remarkable woman) "who quotes twenty volumes at you." "Oh, but there isn't any comparison between them." The faculty of saying such things as these, and of saying them sincerely, Swann had acquired from the Duchess, and had never lost. He made use of it now with reference to the people who came to his house. He forced himself to distinguish, and to admire in them the qualities that every human being will display if we examine him with a prejudice in his favour, and not with the distaste of the nice-minded; he extolled the merits of Mme. Bontemps, as he had once extolled those of the Princesse de Parme, who must have been excluded from the Guermantes set if there had not been privileged terms of admission for certain Highnesses, and if, when they presented themselves for election, no consideration had indeed been paid except to wit and charm. We have seen already, moreover, that Swann had always an inclination (which he was now putting into practice, only in a more lasting fashion) to exchange his social position for another which, in certain circumstances, might suit him better. It is only people incapable of analysing, in their perception, what at first sight appears indivisible who believe that one's position is consolidated with one's person. One and the same man, taken at successive points in his life, will be found to breathe, at different stages on the social ladder, in atmospheres that do not of necessity become more and more refined; whenever, in any period of our existence, we form or re-form associations with a certain environment, and feel that we can move at ease in it and are made comfortable, we begin quite naturally to make ourselves fast to it by putting out roots and tendrils. In so far as Mme. Bontemps was concerned, I believe also that Swann, in speaking of her with so much emphasis, was not sorry to think that my parents would hear that she had been to see his wife. To tell the truth, in our house the names of the people whom Mme. Swann was gradually getting to know pricked our curiosity more than they aroused our admiration. At the name of Mme. Trombert, my mother exclaimed: "Ah! That's a new recruit, and one who will bring in others." And as though she found a similarity between the somewhat summary, rapid and violent manner in which Mme. Swann acquired her friends, as it were by conquest, and a Colonial expedition, Mamma went on to observe: "Now that the Tromberts have surrendered, the neighbouring tribes will not be long in coming in." If she had passed Mme. Swann in the street, she would tell us when she came home: "I saw Mme. Swann in all her war-paint; she must have been embarking on some triumphant offensive against the Massachutoes, or the Cingalese, or the Tromberts." And so with all the new people whom I told her that I had seen in that somewhat composite and artificial society, to which they had often been brought with great difficulty and from widely different surroundings, Mamma would at once divine their origin, and, speaking of them as of trophies dearly bought, would say: "Brought back from an Expedition against the so-and-so!" As for Mme. Cottard, my father was astonished that Mme. Swann could find anything to be gained by getting so utterly undistinguished a woman to come to her house, and said: "In spite of the Professor's position, I must say that I cannot understand it." Mamma, on the other hand, understood quite well; she knew that a great deal of the pleasure which a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more brilliant, with whom she has replaced them. Therefore, she requires an eye-witness who may be allowed to penetrate this new, delicious world (as a buzzing, browsing insect bores its way into a flower) and will then, as the course of her visits may carry her, spread abroad, or so at least one hopes, with the tidings, a latent germ of envy and of wonder. Mme. Cottard, who might have been created on purpose to fill this part, belonged to that special category in a visiting list which Mamma (who inherited certain facets of her father's turn of mind) used to call the "Tell Sparta" people. Besides--apart from another reason which did not come to our knowledge until many years later--Mme. Swann, in inviting this good-natured, reserved and modest friend, had no need to fear lest she might be introducing into her drawing-room, on her brilliant "days", a traitor or a rival. She knew what a vast number of homely blossoms that busy worker, armed with her plume and card-case, could visit in a single afternoon. She knew the creature's power of dissemination, and, basing her calculations upon the law of probability, was led to believe that almost certainly some intimate of the Verdurins would be bound to hear, within two or three days, how the Governor of Paris had left cards upon her, or that M. Verdurin himself would be told how M. Le Hault de Pressagny, the President of the Horse Show, had taken them, Swann and herself, to the King Theodosius gala; she imagined the Verdurins as informed of these two events, both so flattering to herself and of these alone, because the particular materialisations in which we embody and pursue fame are but few in number, by the default of our own minds which are incapable of imagining at one time all the forms which, none the less, we hope--in a general way--that fame will not fail simultaneously to assume for our benefit. Mme. Swann had, however, met with no success outside what was called the "official world". Smart women did not go to her house. It was not the presence there of Republican "notables" that frightened them away. In the days of my early childhood, conservative society was to the last degree worldly, and no "good" house would ever have opened its doors to a Republican. The people who lived in such an atmosphere imagined that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist"--still more, a "horrid radical"--to their parties was something that would endure for ever, like oil-lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But, like at kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern. Before I had made my first Communion, ladies on the "right side" in politics had had the stupefaction of meeting, while paying calls, a smart Jewess. These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a "change of criterion". The Dreyfus case brought about another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to Mme. Swann's, and the kaleidoscope scattered once again its little scraps of colour. Everything Jewish, even the smart lady herself, fell out of the pattern, and various obscure nationalities appeared in its place. The most brilliant drawing-room in Paris was that of a Prince who was an Austrian and ultra-Catholic. If instead of the Dreyfus case there had come a war with Germany, the base of the kaleidoscope would have been turned in the other direction, and its pattern reversed. The Jews having shewn, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots also, would have kept their position, and no one would have cared to go any more, or even to admit that he had ever gone to the Austrian Prince's. All this does not, however, prevent the people who move in it from imagining, whenever society is stationary for the moment, that no further change will occur, just as in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone they decline to believe in the aeroplane. Meanwhile the philosophers of journalism are at work, castigating the preceding epoch, and not only the kind of pleasures in which it indulged, which seem to them to be the last word in corruption, but even the work of its artists and philosophers, which have no longer the least value in their eyes, as though they were indissolubly linked to the successive moods of fashionable frivolity. The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been "great changes". At the time when I went to Mme. Swann's the Dreyfus storm had not yet broken, and some of the more prominent Jews were extremely powerful. None more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife, Lady Israels, was Swann's aunt. She had not herself any intimate acquaintance so distinguished as her nephew's, while he, since he did not care for her, had never much cultivated her society, although he was, so far as was known, her heir. But she was the only one of Swann's relatives who had any idea of his social position, the others having always remained in the state of ignorance, in that respect, which had long been our own. When, from a family circle, one of its members emigrates into "high society"--which to him appears a feat without parallel until after the lapse of a decade he observes that it has been performed in other ways and for different reasons by more than one of the men whom he knew as boys--he draws round about himself a zone of shadow, a _terra incognita_, which is clearly visible in its minutest details to all those who inhabit it with him, but is darkest night and nothingness to those who may not penetrate it but touch its fringe without the least suspicion of its existence in their midst. There being no news agency to furnish Swann's lady cousins with intelligence of the people with whom he consorted, it was (before his appalling marriage, of course) with a smile of condescension that they would tell one another, over family dinner-tables, that they had spent a "virtuous" Sunday in going to see "cousin Charles", whom (regarding him as a "poor relation" who was inclined to envy their prosperity,) they used wittily to name, playing upon the title of Balzac's story, "Le Cousin Bête". Lady Israels, however, was letter-perfect in the names and quality of the people who lavished upon Swann a friendship of which she was frankly jealous. Her husband's family, which almost equalled the Rothschilds in importance, had for several generations managed the affairs of the Orleans Princes. Lady Israels, being immensely rich, exercised a wide influence, and had employed it so as to ensure that no one whom she knew should be "at home" to Odette. One only had disobeyed her, in secret, the Comtesse de Marsantes. And then, as ill luck would have it, Odette having gone to call upon Mme. de Marsantes, Lady Israels had entered the room almost at her heels. Mme. de Marsantes was on tenter-hooks. With the craven impotence of those who are at liberty to act as they choose, she did not address a single word to Odette, who thus found little encouragement to press farther the invasion of a world which, moreover, was not at all that into which she would have liked to be welcomed. In this complete detachment of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Odette continued to be regarded as the illiterate "light woman", utterly different from the respectable ladies, "well up" in all the minutest points of genealogy, who endeavoured to quench by reading biographies and memoirs their thirst for the aristocratic relations with which real life had omitted to provide them. And Swann, for his part, continued no doubt to be the lover in whose eyes all these peculiarities of an old mistress would appear lovable or at least inoffensive, for I have often heard his wife profess what were really social heresies, without his attempting (whether from lingering affection for her, loss of regard for society or weariness of the effort to make her perfect) to correct them. It was perhaps also another form of the simplicity which for so long had misled us at Combray, and which now had the effect that, while he continued to know, on his own account at least, many highly distinguished people, he did not make a point, in conversation in his wife's drawing-room, of our seeming to feel that they were of the smallest importance. They had, indeed, less than ever for Swann, the centre of gravity of his life having been displaced. In any case, Odette's ignorance of social distinctions was so dense that if the name of the Princesse de Guermantes were mentioned in conversation after that of the Duchess, her cousin, "So those ones are Princes, are they?" she would exclaim; "Why, they've gone up a step." Were anyone to say "the Prince", in speaking of the Duc de Chartres, she would put him right with, "The Duke, you mean; he is Duc de Chartres, not Prince." As for the Duc d'Orléans, son of the Comte de Paris: "That's funny; the son is higher than the father!" she would remark, adding, for she was afflicted with anglomania, "Those _Royalties_ are so dreadfully confusing!"--while to someone who asked her from what province the Guermantes family came she replied, "From the Aisne." But, so far as Odette was concerned, Swann was quite blind, not merely to these deficiencies in her education but to the general mediocrity of her intelligence. More than that; whenever Odette repeated a silly story Swann would sit listening to his wife with a complacency, a merriment, almost an admiration into which some survival of his desire for her must have entered; while in the same conversation, anything subtle, anything deep even that he himself might say would be listened to by Odette with an habitual lack of interest, rather curtly, with impatience, and would at times be sharply contradicted. And we must conclude that this enslavement of refinement by vulgarity is the rule in many households, when we think, conversely, of all the superior women who yield to the blandishments of a boor, merciless in his censure of their most delicate utterances, while they go into ecstasies, with the infinite indulgence of love, over the feeblest of his witticisms. To return to the reasons which prevented Odette, at this period, from making her way into the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it must be observed that the latest turn of the social kaleidoscope had been actuated by a series of scandals. Women to whose houses one had been going with entire confidence had been discovered to be common prostitutes, if not British spies. One would, therefore, for some time to come expect people (so, at least, one supposed) to be, before anything else, in a sound position, regular, settled, accountable. Odette represented simply everything with which one had just severed relations, and was incidentally to renew them at once (for men, their natures not altering from day to day, seek in every new order a continuance of the old) but to renew them by seeking it under another form which would allow one to be innocently taken in, and to believe that it was no longer the same society as before the disaster. However, the scapegoats of that society and Odette were too closely alike. People who move in society are very short-sighted; at the moment in which they cease to have any relations with the Israelite ladies whom they have known, while they are asking themselves how they are to fill the gap thus made in their lives, they perceive, thrust into it as by the windfall of a night of storm, a new lady, an Israelite also; but by virtue of her novelty she is not associated in their minds with her predecessors, with what they are convinced that they must abjure. She does not ask that they shall respect her God. They take her up. There was no question of anti-semitism at the time when I used first to visit Odette. But she was like enough to it to remind people of what they wished, for a while, to avoid. As for Swann himself, he was still a frequent visitor of several of his former acquaintance, who, of course, were all of the very highest rank. And yet when he spoke to us of the people whom he had just been to see I noticed that, among those whom he had known in the old days, the choice that he made was dictated by the same kind of taste, partly artistic partly historic, that inspired him as a collector. And remarking that it was often some great lady or other of waning reputation, who interested him because she had been the mistress of Liszt or because one of Balzac's novels was dedicated to her grandmother (as he would purchase a drawing if Chateaubriand had written about it) I conceived a suspicion that we had, at Combray, replaced one error, that of regarding Swann as a mere stockbroker, who did not go into society, by another, when we supposed him to be one of the smartest men in Paris. To be a friend of the Comte de Paris meant nothing at all. Is not the world full of such "friends of Princes", who would not be received in any house that was at all "exclusive"? Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that great nobles and "business men" appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level. But Swann went farther than this; not content with seeking in society, such as it was, when he fastened upon the names which, inscribed upon its roll by the past, were still to be read there, a simple artistic and literary pleasure, he indulged in the slightly vulgar diversion of arranging as it were social nosegays by grouping heterogeneous elements, bringing together people taken at hazard, here, there and everywhere. These experiments in the lighter side (or what was to Swann the lighter side) of sociology did not stimulate an identical reaction, with any regularity, that is to say, in each of his wife's friends. "I'm thinking of asking the Cottards to meet the Duchesse de Vendôme," he would laughingly say to Mme. Bontemps, in the appetised tone of an epicure who has thought of, and intends to try the substitution, in a sauce, of cayenne pepper for cloves. But this plan, which was, in fact, to appear quite humorous, in an archaic sense of the word, to the Cottards, had also the power of infuriating Mme. Bontemps. She herself had recently been presented by the Swanns to the Duchesse de Vendôme, and had found this as agreeable as it seemed to her natural. The thought of winning renown from it at the Cottards', when she related to them what had happened, had been by no means the least savoury ingredient of her pleasure. But like those persons recently decorated who, their investiture once accomplished, would like to see the fountain of honour turned off at the main, Mme. Bontemps would have preferred that, after herself, no one else in her own circle of friends should be made known to the Princess. She denounced (to herself, of course) the licentious taste of Swann who, in order to gratify a wretched aesthetic whim, was obliging her to scatter to the winds, at one swoop, all the dust that she would have thrown in the eyes of the Cottards when she told them about the Duchesse de Vendôme. How was she even to dare to announce to her husband that the Professor and his wife were in their turn to partake of this pleasure, of which she had boasted to him as though it were unique. And yet, if the Cottards could only be made to know that they were being invited not seriously but for the amusement of their host! It is true that the Bontemps had been invited for the same reason, but Swann, having acquired from the aristocracy that eternal "Don Juan" spirit which, in treating with two women of no importance, makes each of them believe that it is she alone who is seriously loved, had spoken to Mme. Bontemps of the Duchesse de Vendôme as of a person whom it was clearly laid down that she must meet at dinner. "Yes, we're determined to have the Princess here with the Cottards," said Mme. Swann a few weeks later; "My husband thinks that we might get something quite amusing out of that conjunction." For if she had retained from the "little nucleus" certain habits dear to Mme. Verdurin, such as that of shouting things aloud so as to be heard by all the faithful, she made use, at the same time, of certain expressions, such as "conjunction", which were dear to the Guermantes circle, of which she thus felt unconsciously and at a distance, as the sea is swayed by the moon, the attraction, though without being drawn perceptibly closer to it. "Yes, the Cottards and the Duchesse de Vendôme. Don't you think that might be rather fun?" asked Swann. "I think they'll be exceedingly ill-assorted, and it can only lead to a lot of bother; people oughtn't to play with fire, is what I say!" snapped Mme. Bontemps, furious. She and her husband were, all the same, invited, as was the Prince d'Agrigente, to this dinner, which Mme. Bontemps and Cottard had each two alternative ways of describing, according to whom they were telling about it. To one set Mme. Bontemps for her part, and Cottard for his would say casually, when asked who else had been of the party: "Only the Prince d'Agrigente; it was all quite intimate." But there were others who might, alas, be better informed (once, indeed, some one had challenged Cottard with: "But weren't the Bontemps there too?" "Oh, I forgot them," Cottard had blushingly admitted to the tactless questioner whom he ever afterwards classified among slanderers and speakers of evil). For these the Bontemps and Cottards had each adopted, without any mutual arrangement, a version the framework of which was identical for both parties, their own names alone changing places. "Let me see;" Cottard would say, "there were our host and hostess, the Duc and Duchesse de Vendôme--" (with a satisfied smile) "Professor and Mme. Cottard, and, upon my soul, heaven only knows how they got there, for they were about as much in keeping as hairs in the soup, M. and Mme. Bontemps!" Mme. Bontemps would recite an exactly similar "piece", only it was M. and Mme. Bontemps who were named with a satisfied emphasis between the Duchesse de Vendôme and the Prince d'Agrigente, while the "also ran", whom finally she used to accuse of having invited themselves, and who completely spoiled the party, were the Cottards. When he had been paying calls Swann would often come home with little time to spare before dinner. At that point in the evening, six o'clock, when in the old days he had felt so wretched, he no longer asked himself what Odette might be about, and was hardly at all concerned to hear that she had people still with her, or had gone out. He recalled at times that he had once, years ago, tried to read through its envelope a letter addressed by Odette to Forcheville. But this memory was not pleasing to him, and rather than plumb the depth of shame that he felt in it he preferred to indulge in a little grimace, twisting up the corners of his mouth and adding, if need be, a shake of the head which signified "What does it all matter?" In truth, he considered now that the hypothesis by which he had often been brought to a standstill in days gone by, according to which it was his jealous imagination alone that blackened what was in reality the innocent life of Odette--that this hypothesis (which after all was beneficent, since, so long as his amorous malady had lasted, it had diminished his sufferings by making them seem imaginary) was not the truth, that it was his jealousy that had seen things in the right light, and that if Odette had loved him better than he supposed, she had deceived him more as well. Formerly, while his sufferings were still keen, he had vowed that, as soon as he should have ceased to love Odette, and so to be afraid either of vexing her or of making her believe that he loved her more than he did, he would afford himself the satisfaction of elucidating with her, simply from his love of truth and as a historical point, whether or not she had had Forcheville in her room that day when he had rung her bell and rapped on her window without being let in, and she had written to Forcheville that it was an uncle of hers who had called. But this so interesting problem, of which he was waiting to attempt the solution only until his jealousy should have subsided, had precisely lost all interest in Swann's eyes when he had ceased to be jealous. Not immediately, however. He felt no other jealousy now with regard to Odette than what the memory of that day, that afternoon spent in knocking vainly at the little house in the Rue Lapérouse, had continued to excite in him; as though his jealousy, not dissimilar in that respect from those maladies which appear to have their seat, their centre of contagion less in certain persons than in certain places, in certain houses, had had for its object not so much Odette herself as that day, that hour in the irrevocable past when Swann had beaten at every entrance to her house in turn. You would have said that that day, that hour alone had caught and preserved a few last fragments of the amorous personality which had once been Swann's, and that there alone could he now recapture them. For a long time now it had made no matter to him that Odette had been false to him, and was false still. And yet he had continued for some years to seek out old servants of Odette, so strongly in him persisted the painful curiosity to know whether on that day, so long ago, at six o'clock, Odette had been in bed with Forcheville. Then that curiosity itself had disappeared, without, however, his abandoning his investigations. He continued the attempt to discover what no longer interested him, because his old ego though it had shrivelled to the extreme of decrepitude still acted mechanically, following the course of preoccupations so utterly abandoned that Swann could not now succeed even in forming an idea of that anguish--so compelling once that he had been unable to foresee his ever being delivered from it, that only the death of her whom he loved (death which, as will be shewn later on in this story, by a cruel example, in no way diminishes the sufferings caused by jealousy) seemed to him capable of making smooth the road, then insurmountably barred to him, of his life. But to bring to light, some day, those passages in the life of Odette to which he owed his sufferings had not been Swann's only ambition; he had in reserve that also of wreaking vengeance for his sufferings when, being no longer in love with Odette, he should no longer be afraid of her; and the opportunity of gratifying this second ambition had just occurred, for Swann was in love with another woman, a woman who gave him--grounds for jealousy, no, but who did all the same make him jealous, because he was not capable, now, of altering his way of making love, and it was the way he had used with Odette that must serve him now for another. To make Swann's jealousy revive it was not essential that this woman should be unfaithful, it sufficed that for any reason she was separated from him, at a party for instance, where she was presumably enjoying herself. That was enough to reawaken in him the old anguish, that lamentable and inconsistent excrescence of his love, which held Swann ever at a distance from what she really was, like a yearning to attain the impossible (what this young woman really felt for him, the hidden longing that absorbed her days, the secret places of her heart), for between Swann and her whom he loved this anguish piled up an unyielding mass of already existing suspicions, having their cause in Odette, or in some other perhaps who had preceded Odette, allowing this now ageing lover to know his mistress of the moment only in the traditional and collective phantasm of the "woman who made him jealous", in which he had arbitrarily incarnated his new love. Often, however, Swann would charge his jealousy with the offence of making him believe in imaginary infidelities; but then he would remember that he had given Odette the benefit of the same argument and had in that been wrong. And so everything that the young woman whom he loved did in those hours when he was not with her appeared spoiled of its innocence in his eyes. But whereas at that other time he had made a vow that if ever he ceased to love her whom he did not then imagine to be his future wife, he would implacably exhibit to her an indifference that would at length be sincere, so as to avenge his pride that had so long been trampled upon by her--of those reprisals which he might now enforce without risk to himself (for what harm could it do him to be taken at his word and deprived of those intimate moments with Odette that had been so necessary to him once), of those reprisals he took no more thought; with his love had vanished the desire to shew that he was in love no longer. And he who, when he was suffering at the hands of Odette, would have looked forward so keenly to letting her see one day that he had fallen to a rival, now that he was in a position to do so took infinite precautions lest his wife should suspect the existence of this new love. * * * It was not only in those tea-parties, on account of which I had formerly had the sorrow of seeing Gilberte leave me and go home earlier than usual, that I was henceforth to take part, but the engagements that she had with her mother, to go for a walk or to some afternoon party, which by preventing her from coming to the Champs-Elysées had deprived me of her, on those days when I loitered alone upon the lawn or stood before the wooden horses,--to these outings M. and Mme. Swann henceforth admitted me, I had a seat in their landau, and indeed it was me that they asked if I would rather go to the theatre, to a dancing lesson at the house of one of Gilberte's friends, to some social gathering given by friends of her parents (what Odette called "a little meeting") or to visit the tombs at Saint-Denis. On days when I was going anywhere with the Swanns I would arrive at the house in time for _déjeuner_, which Mme. Swann called "le lunch"; as one was not expected before half-past twelve, while my parents in those days had their meal at a quarter past eleven, it was not until they had risen from the table that I made my way towards that sumptuous quarter, deserted enough at any hour, but more particularly just then, when everyone had gone indoors. Even on winter days of frost, if the weather held, tightening every few minutes the knot of a gorgeous necktie from Charvet's and looking to see that my varnished boots were not getting dirty, I would roam to and fro among the avenues, waiting until twenty-seven minutes past the hour. I could see from afar in the Swanns' little garden-plot the sunlight glittering like hoar frost from the bare-boughed trees. It is true that the garden boasted but a pair of them. The unusual hour presented the scene in a new light. Into these pleasures of nature (intensified by the suppression of habit and indeed by my physical hunger) the thrilling prospect of sitting down to luncheon with Mme. Swann was infused; it did not diminish them, but taking command of them trained them to its service; so that if, at this hour when ordinarily I did not perceive them, I seemed now to be discovering the fine weather, the cold, the wintry sunlight, it was all as a sort of preface to the creamed eggs, as a patina, a cool and coloured glaze applied to the decoration of that mystic chapel which was the habitation of Mme. Swann, and in the heart of which there were, by contrast, so much warmth, so many scents and flowers. At half-past twelve I would finally make up my mind to enter that house which, like an immense Christmas stocking, seemed ready to bestow upon me supernatural delights. (The French name "Noël" was, by the way, unknown to Mme. Swann and Gilberte, who had substituted for it the English "Christmas", and would speak of nothing but "Christmas pudding", what people had given them as "Christmas presents" and of going away--the thought of which maddened me with grief--"for Christmas". At home even, I should have thought it degrading to use the word "Noël", and always said "Christmas", which my father considered extremely silly.) I encountered no one at first but a footman who after leading me through several large drawing-rooms shewed me into one that was quite small, empty, its windows beginning to dream already in the blue light of afternoon; I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people who are kept waiting in a room beside you but do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more impressive, and received coldly the warmth of a glowing fire of coals, preciously displayed behind a screen of crystal, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled, now and again, its perilous rubies. I had sat down, but I rose hurriedly on hearing the door opened; it was only another footman, and then a third, and the minute result that their vainly alarming entrances and exits achieved was to put a little more coal on the fire or water in the vases. They departed, I found myself alone, once that door was shut which Mme. Swann was surely soon going to open. Of a truth, I should have been less ill at ease in a magician's cave than in this little waiting-room where the fire appeared to me to be performing alchemical transmutations as in Klingsor's laboratory. Footsteps sounded afresh, I did not rise, it was sure to be just another footman; it was M. Swann. "What! All by yourself? What is one to do; that poor wife of mine has never been able to remember what time means! Ten minutes to one. She gets later every day. And you'll see, she will come sailing in without the least hurry, and imagine she's in heaps of time." And as he was still subject to neuritis, and as he was becoming a trifle ridiculous, the fact of possessing so unpunctual a wife, who came in so late from the Bois, forgot everything at her dressmaker's and was never in time for luncheon made Swann anxious for his digestion but flattered his self-esteem. He shewed me his latest acquisitions and explained their interest to me, but my emotion, added to the unfamiliarity of being still without food at this hour, sweeping through my mind left it void, so that while able to speak I was incapable of hearing. Anyhow, so far as the works of art in Swann's possession were concerned, it was enough for me that they were contained in his house, formed a part there of the delicious hour that preceded luncheon. The Gioconda herself might have appeared there without giving me any more pleasure than one of Mme. Swann's indoor gowns, or her scent bottles. I continued to wait, alone or with Swann, and often with Gilberte, come in to keep us company. The arrival of Mme. Swann, prepared for me by all those majestic apparitions, must (so it seemed to me) be something truly immense. I strained my ears to catch the slightest sound. But one never finds quite as high as one has been expecting a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air; after those liveried footmen, suggesting the chorus whose processional entry upon the stage leads up to and at the same time diminishes the final appearance of the queen, Mme. Swann, creeping furtively in, with a little otter-skin coat, her veil lowered to cover a nose pink-tipped by the cold, did not fulfil the promises lavished, while I had been waiting, upon my imagination. But if she had stayed at home all morning, when she arrived in the drawing-room it would be clad in a wrapper of _crêpe-de-Chine_, brightly coloured, which seemed to me more exquisite than any of her dresses. Sometimes the Swanns decided to remain in the house all afternoon, and then, as we had had luncheon so late, very soon I must watch setting, beyond the garden-wall, the sun of that day which had seemed to me bound to be different from other days; then in vain might the servants bring in lamps of every size and shape, burning each upon the consecrated altar of a console, a card-table, a corner-cupboard, a bracket, as though for the celebration of some strange and secret rite; nothing extraordinary transpired in the conversation, and I went home disappointed, as one often is in one's childhood after the midnight mass. But my disappointment was scarcely more than mental. I was radiant with happiness in this house where Gilberte, when she was still not with us, was about to appear and would bestow on me in a moment, and for hours to come, her speech, her smiling and attentive gaze, just as I had caught it, that first time, at Combray. At the most I was a trifle jealous when I saw her so often disappear into vast rooms above, reached by a private staircase. Obliged myself to remain in the drawing-room, like a man in love with an actress who is confined to his stall "in front" and wonders anxiously what is going on behind the scenes, in the green-room, I put to Swann, with regard to this other part of the house questions artfully veiled, but in a tone from which I could not quite succeed in banishing the note of uneasiness. He explained to me that the place to which Gilberte had gone was the linen-room, offered himself to shew it to me, and promised me that whenever Gilberte had occasion to go there again he would insist upon her taking me with her. By these last words and the relief which they brought me Swann at once annihilated for me one of those terrifying interior perspectives at the end of which a woman with whom we are in love appears so remote. At that moment I felt for him an affection which I believed to be deeper than my affection for Gilberte. For he, being the master over his daughter, was giving her to me, whereas she, she withheld herself now and then, I had not the same direct control over her as I had indirectly through Swann. Besides, it was she whom I loved and could not, therefore look upon without that disturbance, without that desire for something more which destroys in us, in the presence of one whom we love, the sensation of loving. As a rule, however, we did not stay indoors, we went out. Sometimes, before going to dress, Mme. Swann would sit down at the piano. Her lovely hands, escaping from the pink, or white, or, often, vividly coloured sleeves of her _crêpe-de-Chine_ wrapper, drooped over the keys with that same melancholy which was in her eyes but was not in her heart. It was on one of those days that she happened to play me the part of Vinteuil's sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated to which one is listening for the first time. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played over to me two or three times I found that I knew it quite well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally "first hearings" and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a minute afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning. It was only that I had not, until then, heard a note of the sonata, and where Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase that was as far beyond the range of my perception as a name which one endeavours to recall and in place of which one discovers only a void, a void from which, an hour later, when one is not thinking about them, will spring of their own accord, in one continuous flight, the syllables that one has solicited in vain. And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of Vinteuil's sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first perceives. Thus it was that I was mistaken not only in thinking that this work held nothing further in store for me (so that for a long time I made no effort to hear it again) from the moment in which Mme. Swann had played over to me its most famous passage; I was in this respect as stupid as people are who expect to feel no astonishment when they stand in Venice before the front of Saint Mark's, because photography has already acquainted them with the outline of its domes. Far more than that, even when I had heard the sonata played from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which its distance or a haze in the atmosphere allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse. Hence the depression inseparable from one's knowledge of such works, as of everything that acquires reality in time. When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from die first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person requires--as I required in the matter of this sonata--to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new. So that the man of genius, to shelter himself from the ignorant contempt of the world, may say to himself that, since one's contemporaries are incapable of the necessary detachment, works written for posterity should be read by posterity alone, like certain pictures which one cannot appreciate when one stands too close to them. But, as it happens, any such cowardly precaution to avoid false judgments is doomed to failure; they are inevitable. The reason for which a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven's Quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half-a-century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a public for Beethoven's Quartets, marking in this way, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in intellectual society, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for brevity's sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed public in the future, a public from which other men of genius shall reap the benefit) shall create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half-a-century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist (and this is what Vinteuil had done), if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, shall launch it, wherever he may find sufficient depth, confidently outward bound towards the future. And yet this interval of time, the true perspective in which to behold a work of art, if leaving it out of account is the mistake made by bad judges, taking it into account is at times a dangerous precaution of the good. No doubt one can easily imagine, by an illusion similar to that which makes everything on the horizon appear equidistant, that all the revolutions which have hitherto occurred in painting or in music did at least shew respect for certain rules, whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it impressionism, a striving after discord, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, cubism, futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that have occurred before. Simply because those that have occurred before we are apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a long process of assimilation has melted them into a continuous substance, varied of course but, taking it as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo blends with Molière. Let us try to imagine the shocking incoherence that we should find, if we did not take into account the future, and the changes that it must bring about, in a horoscope of our own riper years, drawn and presented to us in our youth. Only horoscopes are not always accurate, and the necessity, when judging a work of art, of including the temporal factor in the sum total of its beauty introduces, to our way of thinking, something as hazardous, and consequently as barren of interest, as every prophecy the non-fulfilment of which will not at all imply any inadequacy on the prophet's part, for the power to summon possibilities into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen. If I did not understand the sonata, it enchanted me to hear Mme. Swann play. Her touch appeared to me (like her wrappers, like the scent of her staircase, her cloaks, her chrysanthemums) to form part of an individual and mysterious whole, in a world infinitely superior to that in which the mind is capable of analysing talent. "Attractive, isn't it, that Vinteuil sonata?" Swann asked me. "The moment when night is darkening among the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin call down a cooling dew upon the earth. You must admit that it is rather charming; it shews all the static side of moonlight, which is the essential part. It is not surprising that a course of radiant heat such as my wife is taking, should act on the muscles, since moonlight can prevent the leaves from stirring. That is what he expresses so well in that little phrase, the Bois de Boulogne plunged in a cataleptic trance. By the sea it is even more striking, because you have there the faint response of the waves, which, of course, you can hear quite distinctly, since nothing else dares to move. In Paris it is the other way; at the most, you may notice unfamiliar lights among the old buildings, the sky brightened as though by a colourless and harmless conflagration, that sort of vast variety show of which you get a hint here and there. But in Vinteuil's little phrase, and in the whole sonata for that matter, it is not like that; the scene is laid in the Bois; in the _gruppetto_ you can distinctly hear a voice saying: 'I can almost see to read the paper!'" These words from Swann might have falsified, later on, my impression of the sonata, music being too little exclusive to inhibit absolutely what other people suggest that we should find in it. But I understood from other words which he let fall that this nocturnal foliage was simply that beneath whose shade in many a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris he had listened on many an evening to the little phrase. In place of the profound significance that he had so often sought in it, what it recalled now to Swann were the leafy boughs, arranged, wreathed, painted round about it (which it gave him the desire to see again because it seemed to him to be their inner, their hidden self, as it were their soul); was the whole of one spring season which he had not been able to enjoy before, not having had--feverish and moody as he then was--enough strength of body and mind for its enjoyment, which, as one puts by for an invalid the dainties that he has not been able to eat, it had kept in store for him. The charm that he had been made to feel by certain evenings in the Bois, a charm of which Vinteul's sonata served to remind him, he could not have recaptured by questioning Odette, although she, as well as the little phrase, had been his companion there. But Odette had been merely his companion, by his side, not (as the phrase had been) within him, and so had seen nothing--nor would she, had she been a thousand times as comprehending, have seen anything of that vision which for no one among us (or at least I was long under the impression that this rule admitted no exception) can be made externally visible. "It is rather charming, don't you think," Swann continued, "that sound can give a reflection, like water, or glass. It is curious, too, that Vinteul's phrase now shews me only the things to which I paid no attention then. Of my troubles, my loves of those days it recalls nothing, it has altered all my values." "Charles, I don't think that's very polite to me, what you're saying." "Not polite? Really, you women are superb! I was simply trying to explain to this young man that what the music shews--to me, at least--is not for a moment 'Free-will' or 'In Tune with the Infinite', but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock coat in the palm-house at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. Hundreds of times, without my leaving this room, the little phrase has carried me off to dine with it at Armenonville. Gad, it is less boring, anyhow, than having to go there with Mme. de Cambremer." Mme. Swann laughed. "That is a lady who is supposed to have been violently in love with Charles," she explained, in the same tone in which, shortly before, when we were speaking of Vermeer of Delft, of whose existence I had been surprised to find her conscious, she had answered me with: "I ought to explain that M. Swann was very much taken up with that painter at the time he was courting me. Isn't that so, Charles dear?" "You're not to start saying things about Mme. de Cambremer!" Swann checked her, secretly flattered. "But I'm only repeating what I've been told. Besides, it seems that she's an extremely clever woman; I don't know her myself. I believe she's very pushing, which surprises me rather in a clever woman. But everyone says that she was quite mad about you; there's no harm in repeating that." Swann remained silent as a deaf-mute which was in a way a confirmation of what she had said, and a proof of his own fatuity. "Since what I'm playing reminds you of the Jardin d'Acclimatation," his wife went on, with a playful semblance of being offended, "we might take him there some day in the carriage, if it would amuse him. It's lovely there just now, and you can recapture your fond impressions! Which reminds me, talking of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, do you know, this young man thought that we were devotedly attached to a person whom I cut, as a matter of fact, whenever I possibly can, Mme. Blatin! I think it is rather crushing for us, that she should be taken for a friend of ours. Just fancy, dear Dr. Cottard, who never says a harsh word about anyone, declares that she's positively contagious." "A frightful woman! The one thing to be said for her is that she is exactly like Savonarola. She is the very image of that portrait of Savonarola, by Fra Bartolomeo." This mania which Swann had for finding likenesses to people in pictures was defensible, for even what we call individual expression is--as we so painfully discover when we are in love and would fain believe in the unique reality of the beloved--something diffused and general, which can be found existing at different periods. But if one had listened to Swann, the processions of the Kings of the East, already so anachronistic when Benozzo Gozzoli introduced in their midst various Medici, would have been even more so, since they would have included the portraits of a whole crowd of men, contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann, subsequent, that is to say not only by fifteen centuries to the Nativity but by four more to the painter himself. There was not missing from those trains, according to Swann, a single living Parisian of any note, any more than there was from that act in one of Sardou's plays, in which, out of friendship for the author and for the leading lady, and also because it was the fashion, all the best known men in Paris, famous doctors, politicians, barristers, amused themselves, each on a different evening, by "walking on". "But what has she got to do with the Jardin d'Acclimatation?" "Everything!" "What? You don't suggest that she's got a sky-blue behind, like the monkeys?" "Charles, you really are too dreadful! I was thinking of what the Cingalese said to her. Do tell him, Charles; it really is a gem." "Oh, it's too silly. You know, Mme. Blatin loves asking people questions, in a tone which she thinks friendly, but which is really overpowering." "What our good friends on the Thames call 'patronising'," interrupted Odette. "Exactly. Well, she went the other day to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, where they have some blackamoors--Cingalese, I think I heard my wife say; she is much 'better up' in ethnology than I am." "Now, Charles, you're not to make fun of poor me." "I've no intention of making fun, I assure you. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these black fellows with 'Good morning, nigger!' . . ." "Oh, it's too absurd!" "Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. 'Me nigger,' he shouted, (quite furious, don't you know), to Mme. Blatin, 'me nigger; you, old cow!'" "I do think that's so delightful! I adore that story. Do say it's a good one. Can't you see old Blatin standing there, and hearing him: 'Me nigger; you, old cow'?" I expressed an intense desire to go there and see these Cingalese, one of whom had called Mme. Blatin an old cow. They did not interest me in the least. But I reflected that in going to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and again on our way home, we should pass along that Allée des Acacias in which I had loved so, once, to gaze on Mme. Swann, and that perhaps Coquelin's mulatto friend, to whom I had never managed to exhibit myself in the act of saluting her, would see me there, seated at her side, as the victoria swept by. During those minutes in which Gilberte, having gone to "get ready", was not in the room with us, M. and Mme. Swann would take delight in revealing to me all the rare virtues of their child. And everything that I myself observed seemed to prove the truth of what they said. I remarked that, as her mother had told me, she had not only for her friends but for the servants, for the poor, the most delicate attentions carefully thought out, a desire to give pleasure, a fear of causing annoyance, translated into all sorts of trifling actions which must often have meant great inconvenience to her. She had done some "work" for our stall-keeper in the Champs-Elysées, and went out in the snow to give it to her with her own hands, so as not to lose a day. "You have no idea how kind-hearted she is, she won't let it be seen," her father assured me. Young as she was, she appeared far more sensible already than her parents. When Swann boasted of his wife's grand friends Gilberte would turn away, and remain silent, but without any air of reproaching him, for it seemed inconceivable to her that her father could be subjected to the slightest criticism. One day, when I had spoken to her of Mlle. Vinteuil, she said to me: "I shall never know her, for a very good reason, and that is that she was not nice to her father, by what one hears, she gave him a lot of trouble. You can't understand that any more than I, can you; I'm sure you could no more live without your papa than I could, which is quite natural after all. How can one ever forget a person one has loved all one's life?" And once when she was making herself particularly endearing to Swann, as I mentioned this to her when he was out of the room: "Yes, poor Papa, it is the anniversary of his father's death, just now. You can understand what he must be feeling; you do understand, don't you; you and I feel the same about things like that. So I just try to be a little less naughty than usual." "But he doesn't ever think you naughty. He thinks you're quite perfect." "Poor Papa, that's because he's far too good himself." 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 Ile-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." It appears that in a coincidence as perfect as this was, when reality is folded over to cover the ideal of which we have so long been dreaming, it completely hides that ideal, absorbing it in itself, as when two geometrical figures that are congruent are made to coincide, so that there is but one, whereas we would rather, so as to give its full significance to our enjoyment, preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them, and so as to be quite certain that they are indeed themselves, the distinction of being intangible. And our thought cannot even reconstruct the old state so as to confront the new with it, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance that we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk to which we have listened are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future. I had been able to believe, year after year, that the right to visit Mme. Swann was a vague and fantastic privilege to which I should never attain; after I had spent a quarter of an hour in her drawing-room, it was the period in which I did not yet know her that was become fantastic and vague like a possibility which the realisation of an alternative possibility has made impossible. How was I ever to dream again of her dining-room as of an inconceivable place, when I could not make the least movement in my mind without crossing the path of that inextinguishable ray cast backwards to infinity, even into my own most distant past, by the lobster _à l'Américaine_ which I had just been eating. And Swann must have observed in his own case a similar phenomenon; for this house in which he entertained me might be regarded as the place into which had flowed, to coincide and be lost in one another, not only the ideal dwelling that my imagination had constructed, but another still, that which his jealous love, as inventive as any fantasy of mine, had so often depicted to him, that dwelling common to Odette and himself which had appeared so inaccessible once, on evenings when Odette had taken him home with Forcheville to drink orangeade with her; and what had flowed in to be absorbed, for him, in the walls and furniture of the dining-room in which we now sat down to luncheon was that unhoped-for paradise in which, in the old days, he could not without a pang imagine that he would one day be saying to _their_ butler those very words, "Is Madame ready yet?" which I now heard him utter with a touch of impatience mingled with self-satisfaction. No more than, probably, Swann himself could I succeed in knowing my own happiness, and when Gilberte once broke out: "Who would ever have said that the little girl you watched playing prisoners' base, without daring to speak to her, would one day be your greatest friend, and you would go to her house whenever you liked?" she spoke of a change the occurrence of which I could verify only by observing it from without, finding no trace of it within myself, for it was composed of two separate states on both of which I could not, without their ceasing to be distinct from one another, succeed in keeping my thoughts fixed at one and the same time. And yet this house, because it had been so passionately desired by Swann, must have kept for him some of its attraction, if I was to judge by myself for whom it had not lost all its mystery. That singular charm in which I had for so long supposed the life of the Swanns to be bathed I had not completely exorcised from their house on making my own way into it; I had made it, that charm, recoil, overpowered as it must be by the sight of the stranger, the pariah that I had been, to whom now Mme. Swann pushed forward graciously for him to sit in it an armchair exquisite, hostile, scandalised; but all round me that charm, in my memory, I can still distinguish. Is it because, on those days on which M. and Mme. Swann invited me to luncheon, to go out afterwards with them and Gilberte, I imprinted with my gaze,--while I sat waiting for them there alone--on the carpet, the sofas, the tables, the screens, the pictures, the idea engraved upon my mind that Mme. Swann, or her husband, or Gilberte was about to enter the room? Is it because those objects have dwelt ever since in my memory side by side with the Swanns, and have gradually acquired something of their personal character? Is it because, knowing that the Swanns passed their existence among all those things, I made of all of them as it were emblems of the private lives, of those habits of the Swanns from which I had too long been excluded for them not to continue to appear strange to me, even when I was allowed the privilege of sharing in them? However it may be, always when I think of that drawing-room which Swann (not that the criticism implied on his part any intention to find fault with his wife's taste) found so incongruous--because, while it was still planned and carried out in the style, half conservatory half studio, which had been that of the rooms in which he had first known Odette, she had, none the less, begun to replace in its medley a quantity of the Chinese ornaments, which she now felt to be rather gimcrack, a trifle dowdy, by a swarm of little chairs and stools and things upholstered in old Louis XIV silks; not to mention the works of art brought by Swann himself from his house on the Quai d'Orléans--it has kept in my memory, on the contrary, that composite, heterogeneous room, a cohesion, a unity, an individual charm never possessed even by the most complete, the least spoiled of such collections that the past has bequeathed to us, or the most modern, alive and stamped with the imprint of a living personality; for we alone can, by our belief that they have an existence of their own, give to certain of the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they develop in our minds. All the ideas that I had formed of the hours, different from those that exist for other men, passed by the Swanns in that house which was to their life what the body is to the soul, and must give expression to its singularity, all those ideas were rearranged, amalgamated--equally disturbing and indefinite throughout--in the arrangement of the furniture, the thickness of the carpets, the position of the windows, the ministrations of the servants. When, after luncheon, we went in the sunshine to drink our coffee in the great bay window of the drawing-room, while Mme. Swann was asking me how many lumps of sugar I took, it was not only the silk-covered stool which she pushed towards me that emitted, with the agonising charm that I had long ago felt--first among the pink hawthorn and then beside the clump of laurels--in the name of Gilberte, the hostility that her parents had shewn to me, which this little piece of furniture seemed to have so well understood, to have so completely shared that I felt myself unworthy, and found myself almost reluctant to set my feet on its defenceless cushion; a personality, a soul was latent there which linked it secretly to the light of two o'clock in the afternoon, so different from any other light, in the gulf in which there played about our feet its sparkling tide of gold out of which the bluish crags of sofas and vaporous carpet beaches emerged like enchanted islands; and there was nothing, even to the painting by Rubens hung above the chimneypiece, that was not endowed with the same quality and almost the same intensity of charm as the laced boots of M. Swann, and that hooded cape, the like of which I had so dearly longed to wear, whereas now Odette would beg her husband to go and put on another, so as to appear more smart, whenever I did them the honour of driving out with them. She too went away to change her dress--not heeding my protestations that no "outdoor" clothes could be nearly so becoming as the marvellous garment of _crêpe-de-Chine_ or silk, old rose, cherry-coloured, Tiepolo pink, white, mauve, green, red or yellow, plain or patterned, in which Mme. Swann had sat down to luncheon and which she was now going to take off. When I assured her that she ought to go out in that costume, she laughed, either in scorn of my ignorance or from delight in my compliment. She apologised for having so many wrappers, explaining that they were the only kind of dress in which she felt comfortable, and left us, to go and array herself in one of those regal toilets which imposed their majesty on all beholders, and yet among which I was sometimes summoned to decide which of them I preferred that she should put on. In the Jardin d'Acclimatation, how proud I was when we had left the carriage to be walking by the side of Mme. Swann! While she strolled carelessly on, letting her cloak stream on the air behind her, I kept eyeing her with an admiring gaze to which she coquettishly responded in a lingering smile. And now, were we to meet one or other of Gilberte's friends, boy or girl, who saluted us from afar, I would in my turn be looked upon by them as one of those happy creatures whose lot I had envied, one of those friends of Gilberte who knew her family and had a share in that other part of her life, the part which was not spent in the Champs-Elysées. Often upon the paths of the Bois or the Jardin we passed, we were greeted by some great lady who was Swann's friend, whom he perchance did not see, so that his wife must rally him with a "Charles! Don't you see Mme. de Montmorency?" And Swann, with that amicable smile, bred of a long and intimate friendship, bared his head, but with a slow sweeping gesture, with a grace peculiarly his own. Sometimes the lady would stop, glad of an opportunity to shew Mme. Swann a courtesy which would involve no tiresome consequences, by which they all knew that she would never seek to profit, so thoroughly had Swann trained her in reserve. She had none the less acquired all the manners of polite society, and however smart, however stately the lady might be, Mme. Swann was invariably a match for her; halting for a moment before the friend whom her husband had recognised and was addressing, she would introduce us, Gilberte and myself, with so much ease of manner, would remain so free, so tranquil in her exercise of courtesy, that it would have been hard to say, looking at them both, which of the two was the aristocrat. The day on which we went to inspect the Cingalese, on our way home we saw coming in our direction, and followed by two others who seemed to be acting as her escort, an elderly but still attractive woman cloaked in a dark mantle and capped with a little bonnet tied beneath her chin with a pair of ribbons. "Ah! Here is someone who will interest you!" said Swann. The old lady, who had come within a few yards of us, now smiled at us with a caressing sweetness. Swann doffed his hat. Mme. Swann swept to the ground in a curtsey and made as if to kiss the hand of the lady, who, standing there like a Winterhalter portrait, drew her up again and kissed her cheek. "There, there; will you put your hat on, you!" she scolded Swann in a thick and almost growling voice, speaking like an old and familiar friend. "I am going to present you to Her Imperial Highness," Mme. Swann whispered. Swann drew me aside for a moment while his wife talked of the weather and of the animals recently added to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, with the Princess. "That is the Princesse Mathilde;" he told me, "you know who' I mean, the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas. Just fancy, she's the niece of Napoleon I. She had offers of marriage from Napoleon III and the Emperor of Russia. Isn't that interesting? Talk to her a little. But I hope she won't keep us standing here for an hour!. . . I met Taine the other day," he went on, addressing the Princess, "and he told me that your Highness was vexed with him." "He's behaved like a perfect peeg!" she said gruffly, pronouncing the word _cochon_ as though she referred to Joan of Arc's contemporary, Bishop Cauchon. "After his article on the Emperor I left my card on him with p. p. c. on it." I felt the surprise that one feels on opening the Correspondence of that Duchesse d'Orléans who was by birth a Princess Palatine. And indeed Princesse Mathilde, animated by sentiments so entirely French, expressed them with a straightforward bluntness that recalled the Germany of an older generation, and was inherited, doubtless, from her Wurtemberg mother. This somewhat rude and almost masculine frankness she softened, as soon as she began to smile, with an Italian languor. And the whole person was clothed in a dress so typically "Second Empire" that--for all that the Princess wore it simply and solely, no doubt, from attachment to the fashions that she had loved when she was young--she seemed to have deliberately planned to avoid the slightest discrepancy in historic colour, and to be satisfying the expectations of those who looked to her to evoke the memory of another age. I whispered to Swann to ask her whether she had known Musset. "Very slightly, sir," was the answer, given in a tone which seemed to feign annoyance at the question, and of course it was by way of a joke that she called Swann "Sir", since they were intimate friends. "I had him to dine once. I had invited him for seven o'clock. At half-past seven, as he had not appeared, we sat down to dinner. He arrived at eight, bowed to me, took his seat, never opened his lips, went off after dinner without letting me hear the sound of his voice. Of course, he was dead drunk. That hardly encouraged me to make another attempt." We were standing a little way off, Swann and I. "I hope this little audience is not going to last much longer," he muttered, "the soles of my feet are hurting. I cannot think why my wife keeps on making conversation. When we get home it will be she that complains of being tired, and she knows I simply cannot go on standing like this." For Mme. Swann, who had had the news from Mme. Bontemps, was in the course of telling the Princess that the Government, having at last begun to realise the depth of its depravity, had decided to send her an invitation to be present on the platform in a few days' time, when the Tsar Nicholas was to visit the Invalides. But the Princess who, in spite of appearances, in spite of the character of her circle, which consisted mainly of artists and literary people, had remained at heart and shewed herself, whenever she had to take action, the niece of Napoleon, replied: "Yes, Madame, I received it this morning, and I sent it back to the Minister, who must have had it by now. I told him that I had no need of an invitation to go to the Invalides. If the Government desires my presence there, it will not be on the platform, it will be in our vault, where the Emperor's tomb is. I have no need of a card to admit me there. I have my keys. I go in and out when I choose. The Government has only to let me know whether it wishes, me to be present or not. But if I do go to the Invalides, it will be down below there or nowhere at all." At that moment we were saluted, Mme. Swann and I, by a young man who greeted her without stopping, and whom I was not aware that she knew; it was Bloch. I inquired about him, and was told that he had been introduced to her by Mme. Bontemps, and that he was employed in the Minister's secretariat, which was news to me. Anyhow, she could not have seen him often--or perhaps she had not cared to utter the name, hardly "smart" enough for her liking, of Bloch, for she told me that he was called M. Moreul. I assured her that she was mistaken, that his name was Bloch. The Princess gathered up the train that flowed out behind her, while Mme. Swann gazed at it with admiring eyes. "It is only a fur that the Emperor of Russia sent me," she explained, "and as I have just been to see him I put it on, so as to shew him that I'd managed to have it made up as a mantle." "I hear that Prince Louis has joined the Russian Army; the Princess will be very sad at losing him," went on Mme. Swann, not noticing her husband's signals of distress. "That was a fine thing to do. As I said to him, 'Just because there's been a. soldier, before, in the family, that's no reason!'" replied the Princess, alluding with this abrupt simplicity to Napoleon the Great. But Swann could hold out no longer. "Ma'am, it is I that am going to play the Prince, and ask your permission to retire; but, you see, my wife has not been so well, and I do not like her to stand still for any time." Mme. Swann curtseyed again, and the Princess conferred upon us all a celestial smile, which she seemed to have summoned out of the past, from among the graces of her girlhood, from the evenings at Compiègne, a smile which glided, sweet and unbroken, over her hitherto so sullen face; then she went on her way, followed by the two ladies in waiting, who had confined themselves, in the manner of interpreters, of children's or invalids' nurses, to punctuating our conversation with insignificant sentences and superfluous explanations. "You should go and write your name in her book, one day this week," Mme. Swann counselled me. "One doesn't leave cards upon these 'Royalties', as the English call them, but she will invite you to her house if you put your name down." Sometimes in those last days of winter we would go, before proceeding on our expedition, into one of the small picture-shows that were being given at that time, where Swann, as a collector of mark, was greeted with special deference by the dealers in whose galleries they were held. And in that still wintry weather the old longing to set out for the South of France and Venice would be reawakened in me by those rooms in which a springtime, already well advanced, and a blazing sun cast violet shadows upon the roseate Alpilles and gave the intense transparency of emeralds to the Grand Canal. If the weather were inclement, we would go to a concert or a theatre, and afterwards to one of the fashionable tea-rooms. There, whenever Mme. Swann had anything to say to me which she did not wish the people at the next table, or even the waiters who brought our tea to understand, she would say it in English, as though that had been a secret language known to our two selves alone. As it happened everyone in the place knew English--I only had not yet learned the language, and was obliged to say so to Mme. Swann in order that she might cease to make, on the people who were drinking tea or were serving us with it, remarks which I guessed to be uncomplimentary without either my understanding or the person referred to losing a single word. Once, in the matter of an afternoon at the theatre, Gilberte gave me a great surprise. It was precisely the day of which she had spoken to me some time back, on which fell the anniversary of her grandfather's death. We were to go, she and I, with her governess, to hear selections from an opera, and Gilberte had dressed with a view to attending this performance, and wore the air of indifference with which she was in the habit of treating whatever we might be going to do, with the comment that it might be anything in the world, no matter what, provided that it amused me and had her parents' approval. Before luncheon, her mother drew us aside to tell us that her father was vexed at the thought of our going to a theatre on that day. This seemed to me only natural. Gilberte remained impassive, but grew pale with an anger which she was unable to conceal; still she uttered not a word. When M. Swann joined us his wife took him to the other end of the room and said something in his ear. He called Gilberte, and they went together into the next room. We could hear their raised voices. And yet I could not bring myself to believe that Gilberte, so submissive, so loving, so thoughtful, would resist her father's appeal, on such a day and for so trifling a matter. At length Swann reappeared with her, saying: "You heard what I said. Now you may do as you like." Gilberte's features remained compressed in a frown throughout luncheon, after which we retired to her room. Then suddenly, without hesitating and as though she had never at any point hesitated over her course of action: "Two o'clock!" she exclaimed, "You know the concert begins at half-past." And she told her governess to make haste. "But," I reminded her, "won't your father be cross with you?" "Not the least little bit!" "Surely, he was afraid it would look odd, because of the anniversary." "What difference can it make to me what people think? I think it's perfectly absurd to worry about other people in matters of sentiment. We feel things for ourselves, not for the public. Mademoiselle has very few pleasures; she's been looking forward to going to this concert. I am not going to deprive her of it just to satisfy public opinion." "But, Gilberte," I protested, taking her by the arm, "it is not to satisfy public opinion, it is to please your father." "You are not going to pass remarks upon my conduct, I hope," she said sharply, plucking her arm away. * * * A favour still more precious than their taking me with them to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, the Swanns did not exclude me even from their friendship with Bergotte, which had been at the root of the attraction that I had found in them when, before I had even seen Gilberte, I reflected that her intimacy with that god-like elder would have made her, for me, the most passionately enthralling of friends, had not the disdain that I was bound to inspire in her forbidden me to hope that she would ever take me, in his company, to visit the towns that he loved. And lo, one day, came an invitation from Mme. Swann to a big luncheon-party. I did not know who else were to be the guests. On my arrival I was disconcerted, as I crossed the hall, by an alarming incident. Mme. Swann seldom missed an opportunity of adopting any of those customs which pass as fashionable for a season, and then, failing to find support, are speedily abandoned (as, for instance, many years before, she had had her "private hansom", or now had, printed in English upon a card inviting you to luncheon, the words, "To meet", followed by the name of some more or less important personage). Often enough these usages implied nothing mysterious and required no initiation. Take, for instance, a minute innovation of those days, imported from England; Odette had made her husband have some visiting cards printed on which the name Charles Swann was preceded by "Mr.". After the first visit that I paid her, Mme. Swann had left at my door one of these "pasteboards", as she called them. No one had ever left a card on me before; I felt at once so much pride, emotion, gratitude that, scraping together all the money I possessed, I ordered a superb basket of camellias and had it sent to Mme. Swann. I implored my father to go and leave a card on her, but first, quickly, to have some printed on which his name should bear the prefix "Mr.". He vouchsafed neither of my prayers; I was in despair for some days, and then asked myself whether he might not after all have been right. But this use of "Mr.", if it meant nothing, was at least intelligible. Not so with another that was revealed to me on the occasion of this luncheon-party, but revealed without any indication of its purport. At the moment when I was about to step from the hall into the drawing-room the butler handed me a thin, oblong envelope upon which my name was inscribed. In my surprise I thanked him; but I eyed the envelope with misgivings. I no more knew what I was expected to do with it than a foreigner knows what to do with one of those little utensils that they lay by his place at a Chinese banquet. I noticed that it was gummed down; I was afraid of appearing indiscreet, were I to open it then and there; and so I thrust it into my pocket with an air of knowing all about it. Mme. Swann had written to me a few days before, asking me to come to luncheon with "just a few people". There were, however, sixteen of us, among whom I never suspected for a moment that I was to find Bergotte. Mme. Swann, who had already "named" me, as she called it, to several of her guests, suddenly, after my name, in the same tone that she had used in uttering it (in fact, as though we were merely two of the guests at her party, who ought each to feel equally flattered on meeting the other), pronounced that of the sweet Singer with the snowy locks. The name Bergotte made me jump like the sound of a revolver fired at me point blank, but instinctively, for appearance's sake, I bowed; there, straight in front of me, as by one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock coats, in the smoke of a pistol shot out of which a pigeon has just fluttered, my salute was returned by a young common little thick-set peering person, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a black tuft on his chin. I was cruelly disappointed, for what had just vanished in the dust of the explosion was not only the feeble old man, of whom no vestige now remained; there was also the beauty of an immense work which I had contrived to enshrine in the frail and hallowed organism that I had constructed, like a temple, expressly for itself, but for which no room was to be found in the squat figure, packed tight with blood-vessels, bones, muscles, sinews, of the little man with the snub nose and black beard who stood before me. All the Bergotte whom I had slowly and delicately elaborated for myself, drop by drop, like a stalactite, out of the transparent beauty of his books, ceased (I could see at once) to be of any use, the moment I was obliged to include in him the snail-shell nose and to utilise the little black beard; just as we must reject as worthless the solution of a problem the terms of which we have not read in full, having failed to observe that the total must amount to a specified figure. The nose and beard were elements similarly ineluctable, and all the more aggravating in that, while forcing me to reconstruct entirely the personage of Bergotte, they seemed further to imply, to produce, to secrete incessantly a certain quality of mind, alert and self-satisfied, which was not in the picture, for such a mind had no connexion whatever with the sort of intelligence that was diffused throughout those books, so intimately familiar to me, which were permeated by a gentle and god-like wisdom. Starting from them, I should never have arrived at that snail-shell nose; but starting from the nose, which did not appear to be in the slightest degree ashamed of itself, but stood out alone there like a grotesque ornament fastened on his face, I must proceed in a diametrically opposite direction from the work of Bergotte, I must arrive, it would seem, at the mentality of a busy and preoccupied engineer, of the sort who when you accost them in the street think it correct to say: "Thanks, and you?" before you have actually inquired of them how they are, or else, if you assure them that you have been charmed to make their acquaintance, respond with an abbreviation which they imagine to be effective, intelligent and up-to-date, inasmuch as it avoids any waste of precious time on vain formalities: "Same here!" Names are, no doubt, but whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so little like the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world (which, for that matter, is not the true world, our senses being little more endowed than our imagination with the art of portraiture, so little, indeed, that the final and approximately lifelike pictures which we manage to obtain of reality are at least as different from the visible world as that was from the imagined). But in Bergotte's case, my preconceived idea of him from his name troubled me far less than my familiarity with his work, to which I was obliged to attach, as to the cord of a balloon, the man with the little beard, without knowing whether it would still have the strength to raise him from the ground. It seemed quite clear, however, that it really was he who had written the books that I had so greatly enjoyed, for Mme. Swann having thought it incumbent upon her to tell him of my admiration for one of these, he shewed no surprise that she should have mentioned this to him rather than to any other of the party, nor did he seem to regard her action as due to a misapprehension, but, swelling out the frock coat which he had put on in honour of all these distinguished guests with a body distended in anticipation of the coming meal, while his mind was completely occupied by other, more real and more important considerations, it was only as at some finished episode in his early life, as though one had made an allusion to a costume of the Duc de Guise which he had worn, one season, at a fancy dress ball, that he smiled as he bore his mind back to the idea of his books; which at once began to fall in my estimation (dragging down with them the whole value of Beauty, of the world, of life itself), until they seemed to have been merely the casual amusement of a man with a little beard. I told myself that he must have taken great pains over them, but that, if he had lived upon an island surrounded by beds of pearl-oysters, he would instead have devoted himself to, and would have made a fortune out of the pearling trade. His work no longer appeared to me so inevitable. And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed prove that great writers were gods, ruling each one over a kingdom that was his alone, or whether all that was not rather make-believe, whether the differences between one man's book and another's were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between two contrasted personalities. Meanwhile we had taken our places at the table. By the side of my plate I found a carnation, the stalk of which was wrapped in silver paper. It embarrassed me less than the envelope that had been handed to me in the hall, which, however, I had completely forgotten. This custom, strange as it was to me, became more intelligible when I saw all the male guests take up the similar carnations that were lying by their plates and slip them into the buttonholes of their coats. I did as they had done, with the air of spontaneity that a free-thinker assumes in church, who is not familiar with the order of service but rises when everyone else rises and kneels a moment after everyone else is on his knees. Another usage, equally strange to me but less ephemeral, disquieted me more. On the other side of my plate was a smaller plate, on which was heaped a blackish substance which I did not then know to be caviare. I was ignorant of what was to be done with it but firmly determined not to let it enter my mouth. Bergotte was sitting not far from me and I could hear quite well everything that he said. I understood then the impression that M. de Norpois had formed of him. He had indeed a peculiar "organ"; there is nothing that so much alters the material qualities of the voice as the presence of thought behind what one is saying; the resonance of one's diphthongs, the energy of one's labials are profoundly affected--in fact, one's whole way of speaking. His seemed to me to differ entirely from his way of writing, and even the things that he said from those with which he filled his books. But the voice issues from behind a mask through which it is not powerful enough to make us recognise, at first sight, a face which we have seen uncovered in the speaker's literary style. At certain points in the conversation, when Bergotte, by force of habit, began to talk in a way which no one but M. de Norpois would have thought affected or unpleasant, it was a long time before I discovered an exact correspondence with the parts of his books in which his form became so poetic and so musical. At those points he could see in what he was saying a plastic beauty independent of whatever his sentences might mean, and as human speech reflects the human soul, though without expressing it as does literary style, Bergotte appeared almost to be talking nonsense, intoning certain words and, if he were secretly pursuing, beneath them, a single image, stringing them together uninterruptedly on one continuous note, with a wearisome monotony. So that a pretentious, emphatic and monotonous opening was a sign of the rare aesthetic value of what he was saying, and an effect, in his conversation, of the same power which, in his books, produced that harmonious flow of imagery. I had had all the more difficulty in discovering this at first since what he said at such moments, precisely because it was the authentic utterance of Bergotte, had not the appearance of being Bergotte's. It was an abundant crop of clearly defined ideas, not included in that "Bergotte manner" which so many story-tellers had appropriated to themselves; and this dissimilarity was probably but another aspect--made out with difficulty through the stream of conversation, as an eclipse is seen through a smoked glass--of the fact that when one read a page of Bergotte it was never just what would have been written by any of those lifeless imitators who, nevertheless, in newspapers and in books, adorned their prose with so many "Bergottish" images and ideas. This difference in style arose from the fact that what was meant by "Bergottism" was, first and foremost, a priceless element of truth hidden in the heart of everything, whence it was extracted by that great writer, by virtue of his genius, and that this extraction, and not simply the perpetration of "Bergottisms", was my sweet Singer's aim in writing. Though, it must be added, he continued to perpetrate them in spite of himself, and because he was Bergotte, so that, in one sense, every fresh beauty in his work was the little drop of Bergotte buried at the heart of a thing which he had distilled from it. But if, for that reason, each of those beauties was related to all the rest, and had a "family likeness", yet each remained separate and individual, as was the act of discovery that had brought it to the light of day; new, and consequently different from what was called the Bergotte manner, which was a loose synthesis of all the "Bergottisms" already invented and set forth by him in writing, with no indication by which men who lacked genius might forecast what would be his next discovery. So it is with all great writers, the beauty of their language is as incalculable as that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object of which, and not of their language or its beauty, they are thinking, to which they have not yet given expression. An author of memorials of our time, wishing to write without too obviously seeming to be writing like Saint-Simon, might, on occasion, give us the first line of his portrait of Villars: "He was a rather tall man, dark . . . with an alert, open, expressive physiognomy," but what law of determinism could bring him to the discovery of Saint-Simon's next line, which begins with "and, to tell the truth, a trifle mad"? The true variety is in this abundance of real and unexpected elements, in the branch loaded with blue flowers which thrusts itself forward, against all reason, from the spring hedgerow that seemed already overcharged with blossoms, whereas the purely formal imitation of variety (and one might advance the same argument for all the other qualities of style) is but a barren uniformity, that is to say the very antithesis of variety, and cannot, in the work of imitators, give the illusion or recall other examples of variety save to a reader who has not acquired the sense of it from the masters themselves. And so--just as Bergotte's way of speaking would no doubt have been charming if he himself had been merely an amateur repeating imitations of Bergotte, whereas it was attached to the mind of Bergotte, at work and in action, by essential ties which the ear did not at once distinguish--so it was because Bergotte applied that mind with precision to the reality which pleased him that his language had in it something positive, something over-rich, disappointing those who expected to hear him speak only of the "eternal torrent of forms," and of the "mystic thrills of beauty". Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be quite wrong about it, to be speaking in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be in confusion, for each of us finds lucidity only in those ideas which are in the same state of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the elimination, first, of the stereotyped attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which has seemed to us to be reality itself, every new conversation, as well as all original painting and music, must always appear laboured and tedious. It is founded upon figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must in their time have been images difficult to follow when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But he has long since decided that this must be the real universe, and so relies confidently upon it.) So when Bergotte--and his figures appear simple enough to-day--said of Cottard that he was a mannikin in a bottle, always trying to rise to the surface, and of Brichot that "to him even more than to Mme. Swann the arrangement of his hair was a matter for anxious deliberation, because, in his twofold preoccupation over his profile and his reputation, he had always to make sure that it was so brushed as to give him the air at once of a lion and of a philosopher," one immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which one called more concrete, meaning by that more ordinary. These unintelligible words, issuing from the mask that I had before my eyes, it was indeed to the writer whom I admired that they must be attributed, and yet they could not have been inserted among his books, in the form of a puzzle set in a series of different puzzles, they occupied another plane and required a transposition by means of which, one day, when I was repeating to myself certain phrases that I had heard Bergotte use, I discovered in them the whole machinery of his literary style, the different elements of which I was able to recognise and to name in this spoken discourse which had struck me as being so different. From a less immediate point of view the special way, a little too meticulous, too intense, that he had of pronouncing certain words, certain adjectives which were constantly recurring in his conversation, and which he never uttered without a certain emphasis, giving to each of their syllables a separate force and intoning the last syllable (as for instance the word _visage_, which he always used in preference to figure, and enriched with a number of superfluous v's and s's and g's, which seemed all to explode from his outstretched palm at such moments) corresponded exactly to the fine passages in which, in his prose, he brought those favourite words into the light, preceded by a sort of margin and composed in such a way in the metrical whole of the phrase that the reader was obliged, if he were not to make a false quantity, to give to each of them its full value. And yet one did not find in the speech of Bergotte a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written phrase the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves. In this respect, there were more intonations, there was more accent in his books than in his talk; an accent independent of the beauty of style, which the author himself has possibly not perceived, for it is not separable from his most intimate personality. It was this accent which, at the moments when, in his books, Bergotte was entirely natural, gave a rhythm to the words--often at such times quite insignificant--that he wrote. This accent is not marked on the printed page, there is nothing there to indicate it, and yet it comes of its own accord to his phrases, one cannot pronounce them in any other way, it is what was most ephemeral and at the same time most profound in the writer, and it is what will bear witness to his true nature, what will say whether, despite all the austerity that he has expressed he was gentle, despite all his sensuality sentimental. Certain peculiarities of elocution, faint traces of which were to be found in Bergotte's conversation, were not exclusively his own; for when, later on, I came to know his brothers and sisters, I found those peculiarities much more accentuated in their speech. There was something abrupt and harsh in the closing words of a light and spirited utterance, something faint and dying at the end of a sad one. Swann, who had known the Master as a boy, told me that in those days one used to hear on his lips, just as much as on his brothers' and sisters', those inflexions, almost a family type, shouts of violent merriment interspersed with murmurings of a long-drawn melancholy, and that in the room in which they all played together he used to perform his part, better than any of them, in their symphonies, alternately deafening and subdued. However characteristic it may be, the sound that escapes from human lips is fugitive and does not survive the speaker. But it was not so with the pronunciation of the Bergotte family. For if it is difficult ever to understand, even in the _Meistersinger_ how an artist can invent music by listening to the twittering of birds, yet Bergotte had transposed and fixed in his written language that manner of dwelling on words which repeat themselves in shouts of joy, or fall, drop by drop, in melancholy sighs. There are in his books just such closing phrases where the accumulated sounds are prolonged (as in the last chords of the overture of an opera which cannot come to an end, and repeats several times over its supreme cadence before the conductor finally lays down his baton), in which, later on, I was to find a musical equivalent for those phonetic 'brasses' of the Bergotte family. But in his own case, from the moment in which he transferred them to his books, he ceased instinctively to make use of them in his speech. From the day on which he had begun to write--all the more markedly, therefore, in the later years in which I first knew him--his voice had lost this orchestration for ever. These young Bergottes--the future writer and his brothers and sisters--were doubtless in no way superior, far from it, to other young people, more refined, more intellectual than themselves, who found the Bergottes rather "loud", that is to say a trifle vulgar, irritating one by the witticisms which characterised the tone, at once pretentious and puerile, of their household. But genius, and even what is only great talent, spring less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transposing, and so transforming them. To heat a liquid over an electric lamp one requires to have not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as instead of light to give heat. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into ascending force. Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror, in such a way that their life, however unimportant it may be socially, and even, in a sense, intellectually speaking, is reflected by it, genius consisting in the reflective power of the writer and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. The day on which young Bergotte succeeded in shewing to the world of his readers the tasteless household in which he had passed his childhood, and the not very amusing conversations between himself and his brothers, on that day he climbed far above the friends of his family, more intellectual and more distinguished than himself; they in their fine Rolls Royces might return home expressing due contempt for the vulgarity of the Bergottes; but he, with his modest engine which had at last left the ground, he soared above their heads. But there were other characteristics of his elocution which it was not with the members of his family, but with certain contemporary writers that he must share. Younger men, who were beginning to repudiate him as a master and disclaimed any intellectual affinity to him in themselves, displayed their affinity without knowing it when they made use of the same adverbs, the same prepositions that he incessantly repeated, when they constructed their sentences in the same way, spoke in the same quiescent, lingering tone, by a reaction from the eloquent, easy language of an earlier generation. Perhaps these young men--we shall come across some of whom this may be said--had never known Bergotte. But his way of thinking, inoculated into them, had led them to those alterations of syntax and of accent which bear a necessary relation to originality of mind. A relation which, incidentally, requires to be traced. Thus Bergotte, if he owed nothing to any man for his manner of writing, derived his manner of speaking from one of his early associates, a marvellous talker to whose ascendancy he had succumbed, whom he imitated, unconsciously, in his conversation, but who himself, being less gifted, had never written any really outstanding book. So that if one had been in quest of originality in speech, Bergotte must have been labelled a disciple, a writer at second-hand, whereas, influenced by his friend only so far as talk went, he had been original and creative in his writings. Doubtless again, so as to distinguish himself from the previous generation, too fond as it had been of abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would bring into prominence, what he would quote with approval would always be some scene that furnished the reader with an image, some picture that had no rational significance. "Ah, yes!" he would exclaim, "it is quite admirable! There is a little girl in an orange shawl. It is excellent!" or again, "Oh, yes, there is a passage in which there is a regiment marching along the street; yes, it is excellent!" As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen and Dostoievsky), for the word that always came to his lips when he wished to praise the style of any writer was "mild". "Yes, you know I like Chateaubriand better in _Atala_ than in _René_; he seems to me to be 'milder'." He said the word like a doctor who, when his patient assures him that milk will give him indigestion, answers, "But, you know, it's very 'mild'." And it is true that there was in Bergotte's style a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our own modern tongues in which effects of that kind are not sought. He would say also, with a shy smile, of pages of his own for which some one had expressed admiration: "I think it is more or less true, more or less accurate; it may be of some value perhaps," but he would say this simply from modesty, as a woman to whom one has said that her dress, or her daughter is charming replies, "It is comfortable," or "She is a good girl." But the constructive instinct was too deeply implanted in Bergotte for him not to be aware that the sole proof that he had built usefully and on the lines of truth lay in the pleasure that his work had given, to himself first of all and afterwards to his readers. Only many years later, when he no longer had any talent, whenever he wrote anything with which he was not satisfied, so as not to have to suppress it, as he ought to have done, so as to be able to publish it with a clear conscience he would repeat, but to himself this time: "After all, it is more or less accurate, it must be of some value to the country." So that the phrase murmured long ago among his admirers by the insincere voice of modesty came in the end to be whispered in the secrecy of his heart by the uneasy tongue of pride. And the same words which had served Bergotte as an unwanted excuse for the excellence of his earliest works became as it were an ineffective consolation to him for the hopeless mediocrity of the latest. A kind of austerity of taste which he had, a kind of determination to write nothing of which he could not say that it was "mild", which had made people for so many years regard him as a sterile and precious artist, a chiseller of exquisite trifles, was on the contrary the secret of his strength, for habit forms the style of the writer just as much as the character of the man, and the author who has more than once been patient to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a certain kind of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the boundaries of his talent, just as if he yields too often to pleasure, to laziness, to the fear of being put to trouble, he will find himself describing in terms which no amount of revision can modify, the forms of his own vices and the limits of his virtue. If, however, despite all the analogies which I was to perceive later on between the writer and the man, I had not at first sight, in Mme. Swann's drawing-room, believed that this could be Bergotte, the author of so many divine books, who stood before me, perhaps I was not altogether wrong, for he himself did not, in the strict sense of the word, "believe" it either. He did not believe it because he shewed a great assiduity in the presence of fashionable people (and yet he was not a snob), of literary men and journalists who were vastly inferior to himself. Of course he had long since learned, from the suffrage of his readers, that he had genius, compared to which social position and official rank were as nothing. He had learned that he had genius, but he did not believe it because he continued to simulate deference towards mediocre writers in order to succeed, shortly, in becoming an Academician, whereas the Academy and the Faubourg Saint-Germain have no more to do with that part of the Eternal Mind which is the author of the works of Bergotte than with the law of causality or the idea of God. That also he knew, but as a kleptomaniac knows, without profiting by the knowledge, that it is wrong to steal. And the man with the little beard and snail-shell nose knew and used all the tricks of the gentleman who pockets your spoons, in his efforts to reach the coveted academic chair, I or some duchess or other who could dispose of several votes at the election, but while on his way to them he would endeavour to make sure that no one who would consider the pursuit of such an object a vice in him should see what he was doing. He was only half-successful; one could hear, alternating with the speech of the true Bergotte, that of the other Bergotte, ambitious, utterly selfish, who thought it not worth his while to speak of any but his powerful, rich or noble friends, so as to enhance his own position, he who in his books, when he was really himself, had so well portrayed the charm, pure as a mountain spring, of poverty. As for those other vices to which M. de Norpois had alluded, that almost incestuous love, which was made still worse, people said, by a want of delicacy in the matter of money, if they contradicted, in a shocking manner, the tendency of his latest novels, in which he shewed everywhere a regard for what was right and proper so painfully rigid that the most innocent pleasures of their heroes were poisoned by it, and that even the reader found himself turning their pages with a sense of acute discomfort, and asked himself whether it was possible to go y on living even the quietest of lives, those vices did not at I all prove, supposing that they were fairly imputed to Bergotte, that his literature was a lie and all his sensitiveness mere play-acting. Just as in pathology certain conditions similar in appearance are due, some to an excess others to an insufficiency of tension, of secretion and so forth, so there may be vice arising from supersensitiveness just as much as from the lack of it. Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not of his own personal life but of what is for him the true life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us all. It is the vices (or merely the weaknesses and follies) of the circle in which they live, the meaningless conversation, the frivolous or shocking lives of their daughters, the infidelity of their wives, or their own misdeeds that writers have most often castigated in their books, without, however, thinking it necessary to alter their domestic economy or to improve the tone of their households. And this contrast had never before been so striking as it was in Bergotte's time, because, on the one hand, in proportion as society grew more corrupt, our notions of morality were increasingly exalted, while on the other hand the public were now told far more than they had ever hitherto known about the private lives of literary men; and on certain evenings in the theatre people would point out the author whom I had so greatly admired at Combray, sitting at the back of a box the mere composition of which seemed an oddly humorous, or perhaps keenly ironical commentary upon--a brazen-faced denial of the thesis which he had just been maintaining in his latest book. Not that anything which this or that casual informant could tell me was of much use in helping me to settle the question of the goodness or wickedness of Bergotte. An intimate friend would furnish proofs of his hardheartedness; then a stranger would cite some instance (touching, since he had evidently wished it to remain hidden) of his real depth of feeling. He had behaved cruelly to his wife. But in a village inn, where he had gone to spend the night, he had stayed on to watch over a poor woman who had tried to drown herself, and when he was obliged to continue his journey had left a large sum of money with the landlord, so that he should not turn the poor creature out, but see that she got proper attention. Perhaps the more the great writer was developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, so much the more his own personal life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he imagined the feelings of others as completely as if they had been his own, whenever he was obliged, for any reason, to talk to some person who had been unfortunate (that is to say in a casual encounter) he would, in doing so, take up not his own personal standpoint but that of the sufferer himself, a standpoint in which he would have been horrified by the speech of those who continued to think of their own petty concerns in the presence of another's grief. With the result that he gave rise everywhere to justifiable rancour and to undying gratitude. Above all, he was a man who in his heart of hearts loved nothing really except certain images and (like a miniature set in the floor of a casket) the composing and painting of them in words. For a trifle that some one had sent him, if that trifle gave him the opportunity of introducing one or two of these images, he would be prodigal in the expression of his gratitude, while shewing none whatever for an expensive present. And if he had had to plead before a tribunal, he would inevitably have chosen his words not for the effect that they might have on the judge but with an eye to certain images which the judge would certainly never have perceived. That first day on which I met him with Gilberte's parents, I mentioned to Bergotte that I had recently been to hear Berma in _Phèdre_; and he told me that in the scene in which she stood with her arm raised to the level of her shoulder--one of those very scenes that had been greeted with such applause--she had managed to suggest with great nobility of art certain classical figures which, quite possibly, she had never even seen, a Hesperid carved in the same attitude upon a metope at Olympia, and also the beautiful primitive virgins on the Erechtheum. "It may be sheer divination, and yet I fancy that she visits the museums. It would be interesting to 'establish' that." ("Establish" was one of those regular Bergotte expressions, and one which various young men who had never met him had caught from him, speaking like him by some sort of telepathic suggestion.) "Do you mean the Cariatides?" asked Swann. "No, no," said Bergotte, "except in the scene where she confesses her passion to Œnone, where she moves her hand exactly like Hegeso on the stele in the Ceramic, it is a far more primitive art that she revives. I was referring to the Korai of the old Erechtheum, and I admit that there is perhaps nothing quite so remote from the art of Racine, but there are so many things already in _Phèdre_, . . . that one more . . . Oh, and then, yes, she is really charming, that little sixth century Phaedra, the rigidity of the arm, the lock of hair 'frozen into marble', yes, you know, it is wonderful of her to have discovered all that. There is a great deal more antiquity in it than in most of the books they are labelling 'antique' this year." As Bergotte had in one of his volumes addressed a famous invocation to these archaic statues, the words that he was now uttering were quite intelligible to me and gave me a fresh reason for taking an interest in Berma's acting. I tried to picture her again in my mind, as she had looked in that scene in which I remembered that she had raised her arm to the level of her shoulder. And I said to myself, "There we have the Hesperid of Olympia; there we have the sister of those adorable suppliants on the Acropolis; there is indeed nobility in art!" But if these considerations were to enhance for me the beauty of Berma's gesture, Bergotte should have put them into my head before the performance. Then, while that attitude of the actress was actually existing in flesh and blood before my eyes, at that moment in which the thing that was happening had still the substance of reality, I might have tried to extract from it the idea of archaic sculpture. But of Berma in that scene all that I retained was a memory which was no longer liable to modification, slender as a picture which lacks that abundant perspective of the present tense where one is free to delve and can always discover something new, a picture to which one cannot retrospectively give a meaning that is not subject to verification and correction from without. At this point Mme. Swann joined in the conversation, asking me whether Gilberte had remembered to give me what Bergotte had written about _Phèdre_, and adding, "My daughter is such a scatter-brain!" Bergotte smiled modestly and protested that they were only a few pages, of no importance. "But it is perfectly charming, that little pamphlet, that little 'tract' of yours!" Mme. Swann assured him, to shew that she was a good hostess, to make the rest of us think that she had read Bergotte's essay, and also because she liked not merely to flatter Bergotte, but to make a selection for herself out of what he wrote, to control his writing. And it must be admitted that she did inspire him, though not in the way that she supposed. But when all is said there is, between what constituted the smartness of Mme. Swann's drawing-room and a whole side of Bergotte's work, so close a correspondence that either of them might serve, among elderly men to-day, as a commentary upon the other. I let myself go in telling him what my impressions had been. Often Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told him that I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phèdre raised her arm. "Ah! The designer will be glad to hear that; he is a real artist. I shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud of that effect. I must say, myself, that I do not care for it very much, it drowns everything in a sort of aqueous vapour, little Phèdre standing there looks too like a branch of coral on the floor of an aquarium. You will tell me, of course, that it brings out the cosmic aspect of the play. That is quite true. All the same, it would be more appropriate if the scene were laid in the Court of Neptune. Oh yes, of course, I know the Vengeance of Neptune does come into the play. I don't suggest for a moment that we should think only of Port-Royal, but after all the story that Racine tells us is not the 'Loves of the Sea-Urchins'. Still, it is what my friend wished to have, and it is very well done, right or wrong, and it's really quite pretty when you come to look at it. Yes, so you liked that, did you; you understood what it meant, of course; we feel the same about it, don't we, really; it is a trifle unbalanced, what he's done, you agree with me, but on the whole it is very clever of him." And so, when Bergotte had to express an opinion which was the opposite of my own, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte's opinions were of less value than the Ambassador's; far from it. A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it. Being itself a part of the riches of the universal Mind, it makes its way into, grafts itself upon the mind of him whom it is employed to refute, slips in among the ideas already there, with the help of which, gaining a little ground, he completes and corrects it; so that the final utterance is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not, properly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, founded upon nothing, can find no support, no kindred spirit among the ideas of the adversary, that he, grappling with something which, is not there, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were without reality. Since Bergotte did not sweep aside my objections, I confessed to him that they had won the scorn of M. de Norpois. "But he's an old parrot!" was the answer. "He keeps on pecking you because he imagines all the time that you're a piece of cake, or a slice of cuttle-fish." "What's that?" asked Swann. "Are you a friend of Norpois?" "He's as dull as a wet Sunday," interrupted his wife, who had great faith in Bergotte's judgment, and was no doubt afraid that M. de Norpois might have spoken ill of her to us. "I tried to make him talk after dinner; I don't know if it's his age or his indigestion, but I found him too sticky for words. I really thought I should have to 'dope' him." "Yes, isn't he?" Bergotte chimed in. "You see, he has to keep his mouth shut half the time so as not to use up all the stock of inanities that hold his shirt-front down and his white waistcoat up." "I think that Bergotte and my wife are both very hard on him," came from Swann, who took the "line", in his own house, of a plain, sensible man. "I quite see that Norpois cannot interest you very much, but from another point of view," (for Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of "real life") "he is quite remarkable, quite a remarkable instance of a lover. When he was Secretary at Rome," he went on, after making sure that Gilberte could not hear him, "he had, here in Paris, a mistress with whom he was madly in love, and he found time to make the double journey every week, so as to see her for a couple of hours. She was, as it happens, a most intelligent woman, and is quite attractive to this day; she is a dowager now. And he has had any number of others since then. I'm sure I should have gone stark mad if the woman I was in love with lived in Paris and I was kept shut up in Rome. Nervous men ought always to love, as the lower orders say, 'beneath' them, so that their women have a material inducement to do what they tell them." As he spoke, Swann realised that I might be applying this maxim to himself and Odette, and as, even among superior beings, at the moment when you and they seem to be soaring together above the plane of life, their personal pride is still basely human, he was seized by a violent ill-will towards me. But this was made manifest only in the uneasiness of his glance. He said nothing more to me at the time. Not that this need surprise us. When Racine (according to a story the truth of which has been exploded, though the theme of it may be found recurring every day in Parisian life) made an illusion to Scarron in front of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch on earth said nothing to the poet that evening. It was on the following day, only, that he fell. But as a theory requires to be stated as a whole, Swann, after this momentary irritation, and after wiping his eyeglass, finished saying what was in his mind in these words, words which were to assume later on in my memory the importance of a prophetic warning, which I had not had the sense to take: "The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman's subjection calms the man's jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a little he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells they keep lighted day and night, to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble." I reverted to M. de Norpois. "You must never trust him; he has the most wicked tongue!" said Mme. Swann in an accent which seemed to me to indicate that M. de Norpois had been "saying things" about her, especially as Swann looked across at his wife with an air of rebuke, as though to stop her before she went too far. Meanwhile Gilberte, who had been told to go and get ready for our drive, stayed to listen to the conversation, and hovered between her mother and her father, leaning affectionately against his shoulder. Nothing, at first sight, could be in greater contrast to Mme. Swann, who was dark, than this child with her red hair and golden skin. But after looking at them both for a moment one saw in Gilberte many of the features--for instance, the nose cut short with a sharp, unfaltering decision by the unseen sculptor whose chisel repeats its work upon successive generations--the expression, the movements of her mother; to take an illustration from another form of art, she made one think of a portrait that was not a good likeness of Mme. Swann, whom the painter, to carry out some whim of colouring, had posed in a partial disguise, dressed to go out to a party in Venetian "character". And as not merely was she wearing a fair wig, but every atom of a swarthier complexion had been discharged from her flesh which, stripped of its veil of brownness, seemed more naked, covered simply in rays of light shed by an internal sun, this "make-up" was not just superficial but was incarnate in her; Gilberte had the appearance of embodying some fabulous animal or of having assumed a mythological disguise. This reddish skin was so exactly that of her father that nature seemed to have had, when Gilberte was being created, to solve the problem of how to reconstruct Mme. Swann piecemeal, without any material at her disposal save the skin of M. Swann. And nature had utilised this to perfection, like a master carver who makes a point of leaving the grain, the knots of his wood in evidence. On Gilberte's face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of Odette's nose, the skin was raised so as to preserve intact the two beauty spots of M. Swann. It was a new variety of Mme. Swann that was thus obtained, growing there by her side like a white lilac-tree beside a purple. At the same time it did not do to imagine the boundary line between these two likenesses as definitely fixed. Now and then, when Gilberte smiled, one could distinguish the oval of her father's cheek upon her mother's face, as though some one had mixed them together to see what would result from the blend; this oval grew distinct, as an embryo grows into a living shape, it lengthened obliquely, expanded, and a moment later had disappeared. In Gilberte's eyes there was the frank and honest gaze of her father; this was how she had looked at me when she gave me the agate marble and said "Keep it, to remind yourself of our friendship." But were one to put a question to Gilberte, to ask her what she had been doing, then one saw in those same eyes the embarrassment, the uncertainty, the prevarication, the misery that Odette used in the old days to shew, when Swann asked her where she had been and she gave him one of those lying answers which, in those days, drove the lover to despair and now made him abruptly change the conversation, as an incurious and prudent husband. Often in the Champs-Elysées I was disturbed by seeing this look on Gilberte's face. But as a rule my fears were unfounded. For in her, a purely physical survival of her mother, this look (if nothing else) had ceased to have any meaning. It was when she had been to her classes, when she must go home for some lesson that Gilberte's pupils executed that movement which, in time past, in the eyes of Odette, had been caused by the fear of disclosing that she had, during the day, opened the door to one of her lovers, or was at that moment in a hurry to be at some trysting-place. So one could see the two natures of M. and Mme. Swann ebb and flow, encroaching alternately one upon the other in the body of this Melusine. It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the merits and defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents you will find but one in the child, and allied to that very fault in the other parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it. Indeed, the incarnation of a good moral quality in an incompatible physical blemish is often one of the laws of filial resemblance. Of two sisters, one will combine with the proud bearing of her father the mean little soul of her mother; the other, abundantly endowed with the paternal intelligence, will present it to the world in the aspect which her mother has made familiar; her mother's shapeless nose and scraggy bosom are become the bodily covering of talents which you had learned to distinguish beneath a superb presence. With the result that of each of the sisters one can say with equal justification that it is she who takes more after one or other of her parents. It is true that Gilberte was an only child, but there were, at the least, two Gilbertes. The two natures, her father's and her mother's, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her--and yet one cannot exactly say that, which would let it be thought that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering by being the prey of the two others. Whereas Gilberte was alternately one and the other, and at any given moment no more than one of the two, that is to say incapable, when she was not being good, of suffering accordingly, the better Gilberte not being able at the time, on account of her momentary absence, to detect the other's lapse from virtue. And so the less good of the two was free to enjoy pleasures of an ignoble kind. When the other spoke to you from the heart of her father, she held broad views, you would have liked to engage with her upon a fine and beneficent enterprise; you told her so, but, just as your arrangements were being completed, her mother's heart would already have resumed its control; hers was the voice that answered; and you were disappointed and vexed--almost baffled, as in the face of a substitution of one person for another--by an unworthy thought, an in sincere laugh, in which Gilberte saw no harm, for they sprang from what she herself at that moment was. Indeed, the disparity was at times so great between these two Gilbertes that you asked yourself, though without finding an answer, what on earth you could have said or done to her, last time, to find her now so different. When she herself had arranged to meet you somewhere, not only did she fail to appear, and offer no excuse afterwards, but, whatever the influence might have been that had made her change her mind, she shewed herself in so different a character when you did meet her that you might well have supposed that, taken in by a likeness such as forms the plot of the _Menaechmi_, you were now talking to some one not the person who had so politely expressed her desire to see you, had she not shewn signs of an ill-humour which revealed that she felt herself to be in the wrong, and wished to avoid the necessity of an explanation. "Now then, run along and get ready; you're keeping us waiting," her mother reminded her. "I'm so happy here with my little Papa; I want to stay just for a minute," replied Gilberte, burying her head beneath the arm of her father, who passed his fingers lovingly through her bright hair. Swann was one of those men who, having lived for a long time amid the illusions of love, have seen the prosperity that they themselves brought to numberless women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their benefactors; but in their child they believe that they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them to remain in the world after their death. When there should no longer be any Charles Swann, there would still be a Mlle. Swann, or a Mme. something else, née Swann, who would continue to love the vanished father. Indeed, to love him too well, perhaps, Swann may have been thinking, for he acknowledged Gilberte's caress with a "Good girl!" in that tone, made tender by our apprehension, to which, when we think of the future, we are prompted by the too passionate affection of a creature who is destined to survive us. To conceal his emotion, he joined in our talk about Berma. He pointed out to me, but in a detached, a listless tone, as though he wished to remain to some extent unconcerned in what he was saying, with what intelligence, with what an astonishing fitness the actress said to Œnone, "You knew it!" He was right. That intonation at least had a value that was really intelligible, and might therefore have satisfied my desire to find incontestable reasons for admiring Berma. But it was by the very fact of its clarity that it did not at all content me. Her intonation was so ingenious so definite in intention and in its meaning, that it seemed to exist by itself, so that any intelligent actress might have learned to use it. It was a fine idea; but whoever else should conceive it as fully must possess it equally. It remained to Berma's credit that she had discovered it, but is one entitled to use the word "discover" when the object in question is something that would not be different if one had been given it, something that does not belong essentially to one's own nature seeing that some one else may afterwards reproduce it? "Upon my soul, your presence among us does raise the tone of the conversation!" Swann observed to me, as though to excuse himself to Bergotte; for he had formed the habit, in the Guermantes set, of entertaining great artists as if they were just ordinary friends whom one seeks only to make eat the dishes that they like, play the games, or, in the country, indulge in whatever form of sport they please. "It seems to me that we're talking a great deal of art," he went on. "But it's so nice, I do love it!" said Mme. Swann, throwing me a look of gratitude, as well from good nature as because she had not abandoned her old aspirations towards a more intellectual form of conversation. After this it was to others of the party, and principally to Gilberte that Bergotte addressed himself. I had told him everything that I felt with a freedom which had astonished me, and was due to the fact that, having acquired with him, years before (in the course of all those hours of solitary reading, in which he was to me merely the better part of myself), the habit of sincerity, of frankness, of confidence, I was less frightened by him than by a person with whom I should have been talking for the first time. And yet, for the same reason, I was greatly disturbed by the thought of the impression that I must have been making on him, the contempt that I had supposed he would feel for my ideas dating not from that afternoon but from the already distant time in which I had begun to read his books in our garden at Combray. And yet I ought perhaps to have reminded myself that, since it was in all sincerity, abandoning myself to the train of my thoughts, that I had felt, on the one hand, so intensely in sympathy with the work of Bergotte and on the other hand, in the theatre, a disappointment the reason of which I did not know, those two instinctive movements which had both carried me away could not be so very different from one another, but must be obedient to the same laws; and that that mind of Bergotte which I had loved in his books could not be anything entirely foreign and hostile to my disappointment and to my inability to express it. For my intelligence must be a uniform thing, perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence, in which everyone in the world participates, towards which each of us from the position of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage. Of course, the ideas which I was tempted to seek to disentangle were probably not those whose depths Bergotte usually sounded in his books. But if it were one and the same intelligence which we had, he and I, at our disposal, he must, when he heard me express those ideas, be reminded of them, cherish them, smile upon them, keeping probably, in spite of what I supposed, before his mind's eye a whole world of intelligence other than that an excerpt of which had passed into his books, an excerpt upon which I had based my imagination of his whole mental universe. Just as priests, having the widest experience of the human heart, are best able to pardon the sins which they do not themselves commit, so genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own writings. I ought to have told myself all this (though, for that matter, it was none too consoling a thought, for the benevolent condescension of great minds has as a corollary the incomprehension and hostility of small; and one derives far less happiness from the friendliness of a great writer, which one finds expressed, failing a more intimate association, in his books, than suffering from the hostility of a woman whom one did not choose for her intelligence but cannot help loving). I ought to have told myself all this, but I did not; I was convinced that I had appeared a fool to Bergotte, when Gilberte whispered in my ear: "You can't think how delighted I am, because you have made a conquest of my great friend Bergotte. He's been telling Mamma that he found you extremely intelligent." "Where are we going?" I asked her. "Oh, wherever you like; you know, it's all the same to me." But since the incident that had occurred on the anniversary of her grandfather's death I had begun to ask myself whether Gilberte's character was not other than I had supposed, whether that indifference to what was to be done, that wisdom, that calm, that gentle and constant submission did not indeed conceal passionate longings which her self-esteem would not allow to be visible and which she disclosed only by her sudden resistance whenever by any chance they were frustrated. As Bergotte lived in the same neighbourhood as my parents, we left the house together; in the carriage he spoke to me of my health. "Our friends were telling me that you had been ill. I am very sorry. And yet, after all, I am not too sorry, because I can see quite well that you are able to enjoy the pleasures of the mind, and they are probably what mean most to you, as to everyone who has known them." Alas, what he was saying, how little, I felt, did it apply to myself, whom all reasoning, however exalted it might be, left cold, who was happy only in moments of pure idleness, when I was comfortable and well; I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in life, and how easily I could dispense with the intellect. As I made no distinction among my pleasures between those that came to me from different sources, of varying depth and permanence, I was thinking, when the moment came to answer him, that I should have liked an existence in which I was on intimate terms with the Duchesse de Guermantes, and often came across, as in the old toll-house in the Champs-Elysées, a chilly smell that would remind me of Combray. But in this ideal existence which I dared not confide to him the pleasures of the mind found no place. "No, sir, the pleasures of the mind count for very little with me; it is not them that I seek after; indeed I don't even know that I have ever tasted them." "You really think not?" he replied. "Well, it may be, no, wait a minute now, yes, after all that must be what you like best, I can see it now dearly, I am certain of it." As certainly, he did not succeed in convincing me; and yet I was already feeling happier, less restricted. After what M. de Norpois had said to me, I had regarded my moments of dreaming, of enthusiasm, of self-confidence as purely subjective and barren of truth. But according to Bergotte, who appeared to understand my case, it seemed that it was quite the contrary, that the symptom I ought to disregard was, in fact, my doubts, my disgust with myself. Moreover, what he had said about M. de Norpois took most of the sting out of a sentence from which I had supposed that no appeal was possible. "Are you being properly looked after?" Bergotte asked me. "Who is treating you?" I told him that I had seen, and should probably go on seeing Cottard. "But that's not at all the sort of man you want!" he told me. "I know nothing about him as a doctor. But I've met him at Mme. Swann's. The man's an imbecile. Even supposing that that doesn't prevent his being a good doctor, which I hesitate to believe, it does prevent his being a good doctor for artists, for men of intelligence. People like you must have suitable doctors, I would almost go so far as to say treatment and medicines specially adapted to themselves. Cottard will bore you, and that alone will prevent his treatment from having any effect. Besides, the proper course of treatment cannot possibly be the same for you as for any Tom, Dick or Harry. Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands their disease. How do you expect that Cottard should be able to treat you; he has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare. So that his calculations are inaccurate in your case, the balance is upset; you see, always the little bottle-imp bobbing up again. He will find that you have a dilated stomach; he has no need to examine you for it, since he has it already in his eye. You can see it there, reflected in his glasses." This manner of speaking tired me greatly; I said to myself, with the stupidity of common sense: "There is no more any dilated stomach reflected in Professor Cottard's glasses than there are inanities stored behind the white waistcoat of M. de Norpois." "I should recommend you, instead," went on Bergotte, "to consult Dr. du Boulbon, who is quite an intelligent man." "He is a great admirer of your books," I replied. I saw that Bergotte knew this, and I decided that kindred spirits soon come together, that one has few really "unknown friends". What Bergotte had said to me with respect to Cottard impressed me, While running contrary to everything that I myself believed. I was in no way disturbed by finding my doctor a bore; I expected of him that, thanks to an art the laws of which were beyond me, he should pronounce on the subject of my health an infallible oracle, after consultation of my entrails. And I did not at all require that, with the aid of an intellect, in which I easily outstripped him, he should seek to understand my intellect, which I pictured to myself merely as a means, of no importance in itself, of trying to attain to certain external verities. I doubted greatly whether intellectual people required a different form of hygiene from imbeciles, and I was quite prepared to submit myself to the latter kind. "I'll tell you who does need a good doctor, and that is our friend Swann," said Bergotte. And on my asking whether he was ill, "Well, don't you see, he's typical of the man who has married a whore, and has to swallow a hundred serpents every day, from women who refuse to meet his wife, or men who were there before him. You can see them in his mouth, writhing. Just look, any day you're there, at the way he lifts his eyebrows when he comes in, to see who's in the room." The malice with which Bergotte spoke thus to a stranger of the friends in whose house he had so long been received as a welcome guest was as new to me as the almost amorous tone which, in that house, he had constantly been adopting to speak to them. Certainly a person like my great-aunt, for instance, would have been incapable of treating any of us with that politeness which I had heard Bergotte lavishing upon Swann. Even to the people whom she liked, she enjoyed saying disagreeable things. But behind their backs she would never have uttered a word to which they might not have listened. There was nothing less like the social "world" than our society at Combray. The Swanns' house marked a stage on the way towards it, towards its inconstant tide. If they had not yet reached the open sea, they were certainly in the lagoon. "This is all between ourselves," said Bergotte as he left me outside my own door. A few years later I should have answered: "I never repeat things." That is the ritual phrase of society, from which the slanderer always derives a false reassurance. It is what I should have said then and there to Bergotte, for one does not invent all one's speeches, especially when, one is acting merely as a card in the social pack. But I did not yet know the formula. What my great-aunt, on the other hand, would have said on a similar occasion was: "If you don't wish it to be repeated, why do you say it?" That is the answer of the unsociable, of the quarrelsome. I was nothing of that sort: I bowed my head in silence. Men of letters who were in my eyes persons of considerable importance had had to plot for years before they succeeded in forming with Bergotte relations which continued to the end to be but dimly literary, and never emerged beyond the four walls of his study, whereas I, I had now been installed among the friends of the great writer, at the first attempt and without any effort, like a man who, instead of standing outside in a crowd for hours in order to secure a bad seat in a theatre, is shown in at once to the best, having entered by a door that is closed to the public. If Swann had thus opened such a door to me, it was doubtless because, just as a king finds himself naturally inviting his children's friends into the royal box, or on board the royal yacht, so Gilberte's parents received their daughter's friends among all the precious things that they had in their house, and the even more precious intimacies that were enshrined there. But at that time I thought, and perhaps was right in thinking that this friendliness on Swann's part was aimed indirectly at my parents. I seemed to remember having heard once at Combray that he had suggested to them that, in view of my admiration for Bergotte, he should take me to dine with him, and that my parents had declined, saying that I was too young, and too easily excited to "go out" yet. My parents, no doubt, represented to certain other people (precisely those who seemed to me the most marvellous) something quite different from what they were to me, so that, just as when the lady in pink had paid my father a tribute of which he had shewn himself so unworthy, I should have wished them to understand what an inestimable present I had just received, and to testify their gratitude to that generous and courteous Swann who had offered it to me, or to them rather, without seeming any more to be conscious of its value than is, in Luini's fresco, the charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair, to whom, it appeared, Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking resemblance. Unfortunately, this favour that Swann had done me, which, as I entered the house, before I had even taken off my greatcoat, I reported to my parents, in the hope that it would awaken in their hearts an emotion equal to my own, and would determine them upon some immense and decisive act of politeness towards the Swanns, did not appear to be greatly appreciated by them. "Swann introduced you to Bergotte? An excellent friend for you, charming society!" cried my father, ironically. "It only wanted that!" Alas, when I had gone on to say that Bergotte was by no means inclined to admire M. de Norpois: "I dare say!" retorted my father. "That simply proves that he's a foolish and evil-minded fellow. My poor boy, you never had much common sense, still, I'm sorry to see you fall among a set that will finish you off altogether." Already the mere fact of my frequenting the Swanns had been far from delighting my parents. This introduction to Bergotte seemed to them a fatal but natural consequence of an original mistake, namely their own weakness in controlling me, which my grandfather would have called a "want of circumspection". I felt that I had only, in order to complete their ill-humour, to tell them that this perverse fellow who did not appreciate M. de Norpois had found me extremely intelligent. For I had observed that whenever my father decided that anyone, one of my school friends for instance, was going astray--as I was at that moment--if that person had the approval of somebody whom my father did not rate high, he would see in this testimony the confirmation of his own stern judgment. The evil merely seemed to him more pronounced. I could hear him already exclaiming, "Of course, it all hangs together," an expression that terrified me by the vagueness and vastness of the reforms the introduction of which into my quiet life it seemed to threaten. But since, were I not to tell them what Bergotte had said of me, even then nothing could efface the impression my parents had formed, that this should be made slightly worse mattered little. Besides, they seemed to me so unfair, so completely mistaken, that not only had I not any hope, I had scarcely any desire to bring them to a more equitable point of view. At the same time, feeling, as the words came from my lips, how alarmed they would be by the thought that I had found favour in the sight of a person who dismissed clever men as fools and had earned the contempt of all decent people, praise from whom, since it seemed to me a thing to be desired, would only encourage me in wrongdoing, it was in faltering tones and with a slightly shamefaced air that, coming to the end of my story, I flung them the bouquet of: "He told the Swanns that he had found me extremely intelligent." Just as a poisoned dog, in a field, rushes, without knowing why, straight to the grass which is the precise antidote to the toxin that he has swallowed, so I, without in the least suspecting it, had said the one thing in the world that was capable of overcoming in my parents this prejudice with respect to Bergotte, a prejudice which all the best reasons that I could have urged, all the tributes that I could have paid him must have proved powerless to defeat. Instantly the situation changed. "Oh! He said that he found you intelligent," repeated my mother. "I am glad to hear that, because he is a man of talent." "What! He said that, did he?" my father joined in. "I don't for a moment deny his literary distinction, before which the whole world bows; only it is a pity that he should lead that scarcely reputable existence to which old Norpois made a guarded allusion, when he was here," he went on, not seeing that against the sovran virtue of the magic words which I had just repeated the depravity of Bergotte's morals was little more able to contend than the falsity of his judgment. "But, my dear," Mamma interrupted, "we've no proof that it's true. People say all sorts of things. Besides, M. de Norpois may have the most perfect manners in the world, but he's not always very good-natured, especially about people who are not exactly his sort." "That's quite true; I've noticed it myself," my father admitted. "And then, too, a great deal ought to be forgiven Bergotte, since he thinks well of my little son," Mamma went on, stroking my hair with her fingers and fastening upon me a long and pensive gaze. My mother had not, indeed, awaited this verdict from Bergotte before telling me that I might ask Gilberte to tea whenever I had friends coming. But I dared not do so for two reasons. The first was that at Gilberte's there was never anything else to drink but tea. Whereas at home Mamma insisted on there being a pot of chocolate as well. I was afraid that Gilberte might regard this as "common"; and so conceive a great contempt for us. The other reason was a formal difficulty, a question of procedure which I could never succeed in settling. When I arrived at Mme. Swann's she used to ask me: "And how is your mother?" I had made several overtures to Mamma to find out whether she would do the same when Gilberte came to us, a point which seemed to me more serious that, at the Court of Louis XIV, the use of "Monseigneur." But Mamma would not hear of it for a moment. "Certainly not. I do not know Mme. Swann." "But neither does she know you." "I never said she did, but we are not obliged to behave in exactly the same way about everything. I shall find other ways of being civil to Gilberte than Mme. Swann has with you." But I was unconvinced, and preferred not to invite Gilberte. Leaving my parents, I went upstairs to change my clothes and on emptying my pockets came suddenly upon the envelope which the Swanns' butler had handed me before shewing me into the drawing-room. I was now alone. I opened it; inside was a card on which I was told the name of the lady whom I ought to have "taken in" to luncheon. It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness (which, for that matter, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering), by assuring me that, in contradiction of all that I had believed at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, women never asked for anything better than to make love. He added to this service a second, the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later; it was he who took me for the first time into a disorderly house. He had indeed told me that there were any number of pretty women whom one might enjoy. But I could see them only in a vague outline for which those houses were to enable me to substitute actual human features. So that if I owed to Bloch--for his "good tidings" that beauty and the enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things, and that we have acted foolishly in renouncing them for all time--a debt of gratitude of the same kind that we owe to an optimistic physician or philosopher who has given us reason to hope for length of days in this world and not to be entirely cut off from it when we shall have passed beyond the veil, the houses of assignation which I began to frequent some years later--by furnishing me with specimens of beauty, by allowing me to add to the beauty of women that element which we are powerless to invent, which is something more than a mere summary of former beauties, that present indeed divine, the one present that we cannot bestow upon ourselves, before which faint and fail all the logical creations of our intellect, and which we can seek from reality alone: an individual charm--deserved to be ranked by me with those other benefactors more recent in origin but of comparable utility (before finding which we used to imagine without any warmth the seductive charms of Mantegna, of Wagner, of Siena, by studying other painters, hearing other composers, visiting other cities): namely illustrated editions of the history of painting, symphonic concerts and handbooks to 'Mediaeval Towns'. But the house to which Bloch led me, (and which he himself, for that matter, had long ceased to visit) was of too humble a grade, its denizens were too inconspicuous and too little varied to be able to satisfy my old or to stimulate new curiosities. The mistress of this house knew none of the women with whom one asked her to negotiate, and was always suggesting others whom, one did not want. She boasted to me of one in particular, one of whom, with a smile full of promise (as though this; had been a great rarity and a special treat) she would whisper: "She is a Jewess! Doesn't that make you want to?" (That, by the way, was probably why the girl's name was Rachel.) And with a silly and affected excitement which, she hoped, would prove contagious, and which ended in a hoarse gurgle, almost of sensual satisfaction: "Think of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn't that be lovely? Rrrr!" This Rachel, of whom I caught a glimpse without her seeing me, was dark and not good-looking, but had an air of intelligence, and would pass the tip of her tongue over her lips as she smiled, with a look of boundless impertinence at the "boys" who were introduced to her and whom I could hear making conversation. Her small and narrow face was framed in short curls of black hair, irregular as though they were outlined in pen-strokes upon a wash-drawing in Indian ink. Every evening I promised the old woman who offered her to me with a special insistence, boasting of her superior intelligence and her education, that I would not fail to come some day on purpose to make the acquaintance of Rachel, whom I had nicknamed "Rachel when from the Lord". But the first evening I had heard her, as she was leaving the house, say to the mistress: "That's settled then; I shall be free to-morrow, if you have anyone you won't forget to send for me." And these words had prevented me from recognising her as a person because they had made me classify her at once in a general category of women whose habit, common to all of them, was to come there in the evening to see whether there might not be a louis or two to be earned. She would simply vary her formula, saying indifferently: "If you want me" or "If you want anybody." The mistress, who was not familiar with Halévy's opera, did not know why I always called the girl "Rachel when from the Lord." But failure to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing, and it was always with a whole-hearted laugh that she would say to me: "Then there's nothing doing to-night? When am I going to fix you up with 'Rachel when from the Lord'? Why do you always say that, 'Rachel when from the Lord'? Oh, that's very smart, that is. I'm going to make a match of you two. You won't be sorry for it, you'll see." Once I was just making up my mind, but she was "in the press", another time in the hands of the hairdresser, an elderly gentleman who never did anything for the women except pour oil on their loosened hair and then comb it. And I grew tired of waiting, even though several of the humbler frequenters of the place (working girls, they called themselves, but they always seemed to be out of work), had come to mix drinks for me and to hold long conversations to which, despite the gravity of the subjects discussed, the partial or total nudity of the speakers gave an attractive simplicity. I ceased moreover to go to this house because, anxious to present a token of my good-will to the woman who kept it and was in need of furniture, I had given her several pieces, notably a big sofa, which I had inherited from my aunt Léonie. I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a warehouse. But as soon as I discovered them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that one had imbibed in the air of my aunt's room at Combray became apparent to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their helplessness! Had I outraged the dead, I should not have suffered such remorse. I returned no more to visit their new mistress, for they seemed to me to be alive, and to be appealing to me, like those objects, apparently inanimate, in a Persian fairy tale, in which are embodied human souls that are undergoing martyrdom and plead for deliverance. Besides, as our memory presents things to us, as a rule, not in their chronological sequence but as it were by a reflexion in which the order of the parts is reversed, I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the sweets of love with one of my girl cousins, with whom I had not known where to go until she somewhat rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which aunt Léonie had left her room. A whole lot more of my aunt Léonie's things, and notably a magnificent set of old silver plate, I sold, in spite of my parents' warnings, so as to have more money to spend, and to be able to send more flowers to Mme. Swann who would greet me, after receiving an immense basket of orchids, with: "If I were your father, I should have you up before the magistrate for this." How was I to suppose that one day I might regret more than anything the loss of my silver plate, and rank certain other pleasures more highly than that (which would have shrunk perhaps into none at all) of bestowing favours upon Gilberte's parents. Similarly, it was with Gilberte in my mind, and so as not to be separated from her, that I had decided not to enter a career of diplomacy abroad. It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions. I could scarcely imagine that that strange substance which was housed in Gilberte, and from her permeated her parents and her home, leaving me indifferent to all things else, could be liberated from her, could migrate into another person. The same substance, unquestionable, and yet one that would have a wholly different effect on me. For a single malady goes through various evolutions, and a delicious poison can no longer be taken with the same impunity when, with the passing of the years, the heart's power of resistance has diminished. My parents meanwhile would have liked to see the intelligence that Bergotte had discerned in me made manifest in some remarkable achievement. When I still did not know the Swanns I thought that I was prevented from working by the state of agitation into which I was thrown by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte when I chose. But, now that their door stood open to me, scarcely had I sat down at my desk than I would rise and run to them. And after I had left them and was at home again, my isolation was apparent only, my mind was powerless to swim against the stream of words on which I had allowed myself mechanically to be borne for hours on end. Sitting alone, I continued to fashion remarks such as might have pleased or amused the Swanns, and to make this pastime more entertaining I myself took the parts of those absent players, I put to myself imagined questions, so chosen that my brilliant epigrams served merely as happy answers to them. Though conducted in silence, this exercise was none the less a conversation and not a meditation, my solitude a mental society in which it was not I myself but other imaginary speakers who controlled my choice of words, and in which I felt as I formulated, in place of the thoughts that I believed to be true, those that came easily to my mind, and involved no introspection from without, that kind of pleasure, entirely passive, which sitting still affords to anyone who is burdened with a sluggish digestion. Had I been less firmly resolved upon setting myself definitely to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of that long morrow in which everything was so well arranged because I myself had not yet entered it, my good intentions would be realised without difficulty, it was better not to select an evening on which I was ill-disposed for a beginning for which the following days were not, alas, to shew themselves any more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after next I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient for a few hours and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the morrow was not that vast, external day to which I in my fever had looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realised at once, no longer the courage, therefore, to subordinate everything else to their realisation: I began again to keep late hours, having no longer, to oblige me to go to bed early on any evening, the certain hope of seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I could recover my creative energy, several days of relaxation, and the only time that my grandmother ventured, in a gentle and disillusioned tone, to frame the reproach: "Well, and that work of yours; aren't we even to speak of it now?" I resented her intrusion, convinced that in her inability to see that my mind was irrevocably made up, she had further and perhaps for a long time postponed the execution of my task, by the shock which her denial of justice to me had given my nerves, since until I had recovered from that shock I should not feel inclined to begin my work. She felt that her scepticism had charged blindly into my intention. She apologised, kissing me: "I am sorry; I shall not say anything again," and, so that I should not be discouraged, assured me that, from the day on which I should be quite well again, the work would come of its own accord from my superfluity of strength. Besides, I said to myself, in spending all my time with the Swanns, am I not doing exactly what Bergotte does? To my parents it seemed almost as though, idle as I was, I was leading, since it was spent in the same drawing-room with a great writer, the life most favourable to the growth of talent. And yet the assumption that anyone can be dispensed from having to create that talent for himself, from within himself, and can acquire it from some one else, is as impossible as it would be to suppose that a man can keep himself in good health, in spite of neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst excesses, merely by dining out often in the company of a physician. The person, by the way, who was most completely taken in by this illusion, which misled me as well as my parents, was Mme. Swann. When I explained to her that I was unable to come, that I must stay at home and work, she looked as though she were thinking that I made a great fuss about nothing, that there was something foolish as well as ostentatious in what I had said. "But Bergotte is coming, isn't he? Do you mean that you don't think it good, what he writes? It will be better still, very soon," she went on, "for he is more pointed, he concentrates more in newspaper articles than in his books, where he is apt to spread out too much. I've arranged that in future he's to do the leading articles in the _Figaro._ He'll be distinctly the 'right man in the right place' there." And, finally, "Come! He will tell you, better than anyone, what you ought to do." And so, just as one invites a gentleman ranker to meet his colonel, it was in the interests of my career, and as though masterpieces of literature arose out of "getting to know" people, that she told me not to fail to come to dinner with her next day, to meet Bergotte. And so there was not from the Swanns any more than from my parents, that is to say from those who, at different times, had seemed bound to place obstacles in my way, any further opposition to that pleasant existence in which I might see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enjoyment if not with peace of mind. There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires. So long as I had not been free to go to her, having my eyes fixed upon that inaccessible goal of happiness, I could not so much as imagine the fresh grounds for anxiety that lay in wait for me there. Once the resistance of her parents was broken, and the problem solved at last, it began to set itself anew, and always in different terms. Each evening, on arriving home, I reminded myself that I had things to say to Gilberte of prime importance, things upon which our whole friendship hung, and these things were never the same. But at least I was happy, and no further menace arose to threaten my happiness. One was to appear, alas, from a quarter in which I had never detected any peril, namely from Gilberte and myself. And yet I ought to have been tormented by what, on the contrary, reassured me, by what I mistook for happiness. We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to an accident, the most simple to all appearance and one that may at any moment occur, a serious aspect which that accident by itself would not bear. What makes us so happy is the presence in our heart of an unstable element which we are perpetually arranging to keep in position, and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. Actually, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes conditional only, procrastinates, but which may at any moment become what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we were seeking, sheer agony. On several occasions I felt that Gilberte was anxious to put off my visits. It is true that when I was at all anxious to see her I had only to get myself invited by her parents who were increasingly persuaded of my excellent influence over her. "Thanks to them," I used to think, "my love is running no risk; the moment I have them on my side, I can set my mind at rest; they have full authority over Gilberte." Until, alas, I detected certain signs of impatience which she allowed to escape her when her father made me come to the house, almost against her will, and asked myself whether what I had regarded as a protection for my happiness was not in fact the secret reason why that happiness could not endure. The last time that I called to see Gilberte, it was raining; she had been asked to a dancing lesson in the house of some people whom she knew too slightly to be able to take me there with her. In view of the dampness of the air I had taken rather more caffeine than usual. Perhaps on account of the weather, or because she had some objection to the house in which this party was being given, Mme. Swann, as her daughter was leaving the room, called her back in the sharpest of tones: "Gilberte!" and pointed to me, to indicate that I had come there to see her and that she ought to stay with me. This "Gilberte!" had been uttered, or shouted rather, with the best of intentions towards myself, but from the way in which Gilberte shrugged her shoulders as she took off her outdoor clothes I divined that her mother had unwittingly hastened the gradual evolution, which until then it had perhaps been possible to arrest, which was gradually drawing away from me my friend. "You don't need to go out dancing every day," Odette told her daughter, with a sagacity acquired, no doubt, in earlier days, from Swann. Then, becoming once more Odette, she began speaking to her daughter in English. At once it was as though a wall had sprung up to hide from me a part of the life of Gilberte, as though an evil genius had spirited my friend far away. In a language that we know, we have substituted for the opacity of sounds, the perspicuity of ideas. But a language which we do not know is a fortress sealed, within whose walls she whom we love is free to play us false, while we, standing without, desperately alert in our impotence, can see, can prevent nothing. So this conversation in English, at which, a month earlier, I should merely have smiled, interspersed with a few proper names in French which did not fail to accentuate, to give a point to my uneasiness, had, when conducted within a few feet of me by two motionless persons, the same degree of cruelty, left me as much abandoned and alone as the forcible abduction of my companion. At length Mme. Swann left us. That day, perhaps from resentment against myself, the unwilling cause of her not going out to enjoy herself, perhaps also because, guessing her to be angry with me, I was precautionally colder than usual with her, the face of Gilberte, divested of every sign of joy, bleak, bare, pillaged, seemed all afternoon to be devoting a melancholy regret to the pas-de-quatre in which my arrival had prevented her from going to take part, and to be defying every living creature, beginning with myself, to understand the subtle reasons that had determined in her a sentimental attachment to the boston. She confined herself to exchanging with me, now and again, on the weather, the increasing violence of the rain, the fastness of the clock, a conversation punctuated with silences and monosyllables, in which I lashed myself on, with a sort of desperate rage, to the destruction of those moments which we might have devoted to friendship and happiness. And on each of our remarks was stamped, as it were, a supreme harshness, by the paroxysm of their stupefying unimportance, which at the same time consoled me, for it prevented Gilberte from being taken in by the banality of my observations and the indifference of my tone. In vain was my polite: "I thought, the other day, that the clock was slow, if anything;" she evidently understood me to mean: "How tiresome you are being!" Obstinately as I might protract, over the whole length of that rain-sodden afternoon, the dull cloud of words through which no fitful ray shone, I knew that my coldness was not so unalterably fixed as I pretended, and that Gilberte must be fully aware that if, after already saying it to her three times, I had hazarded a fourth repetition of the statement that the evenings were drawing in, I should have had difficulty in restraining myself from bursting into tears. When she was like that, when no smile filled her eyes or unveiled her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost livid, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, fixed in an immutable and low horizon. At length, as I saw no sign in Gilberte of the happy change for which I had been waiting now for some hours, I told her that she was not being nice. "It is you that are not being nice," was her answer. "Oh, but surely---" I asked myself what I could have done, and, finding no answer, put the question to her. "Naturally, you think yourself nice!" she said to me with a laugh, and went on laughing. Whereupon I felt all the anguish that there was for me in not being able to attain to that other, less perceptible plane of her mind which her laughter indicated. It seemed, that laughter, to mean: "No, no, I'm not going to let myself be moved by anything that you say, I know you're madly in love with me, but that leaves me neither hot nor cold, for I don't care a rap for you." But I told myself that, after all, laughter was not a language so well defined that I could be certain of understanding what this laugh really meant. And Gilberte's words were affectionate. "But how am I not being nice," I asked her, "tell me; I will do anything you want." "No; that wouldn't be any good. I can't explain." For a moment I was afraid that she thought that I did not love her, and this was for me a fresh agony, no less keen, but one that required treatment by a different conversational method. "If you knew how much you were hurting me you would tell me." But this pain which, had she doubted my love for her, must have rejoiced her, seemed instead to make her more angry. Then, realising my mistake, making up my mind to pay no more attention to what she said, letting her (without bothering to believe her) assure me: "I do love you, indeed I do; you will see one day," (that day on which the guilty are convinced that their innocence will be made clear, and which, for some mysterious reason, never happens to be the day on which their evidence is taken), I had the courage to make a sudden resolution not to see her again, and without telling her of it yet since she would not have believed me. Grief that is caused one by a person with whom one is in love can be bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not directly involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to it. But when such a grief has its birth--as was now happening--at a moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us to the exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling to the end. The tempest that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home baffled, battered, feeling that I could recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte's presence. But she would have said to herself: "Back again! Evidently I can go to any length with him; he will come back every time, and the more wretched he is when he leaves me the more docile he'll be." Besides, I was irresistibly drawn towards her in thought, and those alternative orientations, that mad careering between them of the compass-needle within me persisted after I had reached home, and expressed themselves in the mutually contradictory letters to Gilberte which I began to draft. I was about to pass through one of those difficult crises which we generally find that we have to face at various stages in life, and which, for all that there has been no change in our character, in our nature (that nature which itself creates our loves, and almost creates the women whom we love, even to their faults), we do not face in the same way on each occasion, that is to say at every age. At such moments our life is divided, and so to speak distributed over a pair of scales, in two counterpoised pans which between them contain it all. In one there is our desire not to displease, not to appear too humble to the creature whom we love without managing to understand her, but whom we find it more convenient at times to appear almost to disregard, so that she shall not have that sense of her own indispensability which may turn her from us; in the other scale there is a feeling of pain--and one that is not localised and partial only--which cannot be set at rest unless, abandoning every thought of pleasing the woman and of making her believe that we can dispense with her, we go at once to find her. When we withdraw from the pan in which our pride lies a small quantity of the will-power which we have weakly allowed to exhaust itself with increasing age, when we add to the pan that holds our suffering a physical pain which we have acquired and have let grow, then, instead of the courageous solution that would have carried the day at one-and-twenty, it is the other, grown too heavy and insufficiently balanced, that crushes us down at fifty. All the more because situations, while repeating themselves, tend to alter, and there is every likelihood that, in middle life or in old age, we shall have had the grim satisfaction of complicating our love by an intrusion of habit which adolescence, repressed by other demands upon it, less master of itself, has never known. I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed the tempest of my wrath to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of a few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to which my friend might be brought to a reconciliation; a moment later, the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I addressed to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn expressions, those "nevermores" so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who will have to read them, whether she believe them to be false and translate "nevermore" by "this very evening, if you want me," or believe them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those final separations which make so little difference to our lives when the other person is one with whom we are not in love. But since we are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the next persons whom we shall presently have become, and who will then be in love no longer, how are we to imagine the actual state of mind of a woman whom, even when we are conscious that we are of no account to her, we have perpetually represented in our musings as uttering, so as to lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same speeches that she would make if she loved us. When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing any connexion between one phenomenon and another, to whose eyes the spectacle of the world would appear unstable as a dream. Of course I made efforts to emerge from this incoherence, to find reasons for things. I tried even to be "objective" and, to that end, to bear well in mind the disproportion that existed between the importance which Gilberte had in my eyes and that, not only which I had in hers, but which she herself had in the eyes of other people, a disproportion which, had I failed to remark it, would have involved my mistaking mere friendliness on my friend's part for a passionate avowal, and a grotesque and debasing display on my own for the simple and graceful movement with which we are attracted towards a pretty face. But I was afraid also of falling into the contrary error, in which I should have seen in Gilberte's unpunctuality in keeping an appointment an irremediable hostility. I tried to discover between these two perspectives, equally distorting, a third which would enable me to see things as they really were; the calculations I was obliged to make with that object helped to take my mind off my sufferings; and whether in obedience to the laws of arithmetic or because I had made them give me the answer that I desired, I made up my mind that next day I would go to the Swanns', happy, but happy in the same way as people who, having long been tormented by the thought of a journey which they have not wished to make, go no farther than to the Station and return home to unpack their boxes. And since, while one is hesitating, the bare idea of a possible resolution (unless one has rendered that idea sterile by deciding that one will make no resolution) develops, like a seed in the ground, the lineaments, every detail of the emotions that will be born from the performance of the action, I told myself that it had been quite absurd of me to be as much hurt by the suggestion that I should not see Gilberte again as if I had really been about to put that suggestion into practice, and that since, on the contrary, I was to end by returning to her side, I might have saved myself the expense of all those vain longings and painful acceptances. But this resumption of friendly relations lasted only so long as it took me to reach the Swanns'; not because their butler, who was really fond of me, told me that Gilberte had gone out (a statement the truth of which was confirmed, as it happened, the same evening, by people who had seen her somewhere), but because of the manner in which he said it. "Sir, the young lady is not at home; I can assure you, sir, that I am speaking the truth. If you wish to make any inquiries I can fetch the young lady's maid. You know very well, sir, that I would do everything in my power to oblige you, and that if the young lady was at home I would take you to her at once." These words being of the only kind that is really important, that is to say spontaneous, the kind that gives us a radiograph shewing the main points, at any rate, of the unimaginable reality which would be wholly concealed beneath a prepared speech, proved that in Gilberte's household there was an impression that I bothered her with my visits; and so, scarcely had the man uttered them before they had aroused in me a hatred of which I preferred to make him rather than Gilberte the victim; he drew upon his own head all the angry feelings that I might have had for my friend; freed from these complications, thanks to his words, my love subsisted alone; but his words had, at the same time, shewn me that I must cease for the present to attempt to see Gilberte. She would be certain to write to me, to apologise. In spite of which, I should not return at once to see her, so as to prove to her that I was capable of living without her. Besides, once I had received her letter, Gilberte's society was a thing with which I should be more easily able to dispense for a time, since I should be certain of finding her ready to receive me whenever I chose. All that I needed in order to support with less pain the burden of a voluntary separation was to feel that my heart was rid of the terrible uncertainty whether we were not irreconcilably sundered, whether she had not promised herself to another, left Paris, been taken away by force. The days that followed resembled the first week of that old New Year which I had had to spend alone, without Gilberte. But when that week had dragged to its end, then for one thing my friend would be coming again to the Champs-Elysées, I should be seeing her as before; I had been sure of that; for another thing, I had known with no less certainty that so long as the New Year holidays lasted it would not be worth my while to go to the Champs-Elysées, which meant that during that miserable week, which was already ancient history, I had endured my wretchedness with a quiet mind because there was blended in it neither fear nor hope. Now, on the other hand, it was the latter of these which, almost as much as my fear of what might happen, rendered intolerable the burden of my grief. Not having had any letter from Gilberte that evening, I had attributed this to her carelessness, to her other occupations, I did not doubt that I should find something from her in the morning's post. This I awaited, every day, with a beating heart which subsided, leaving me utterly prostrate, when I had found in it only letters from people who were not Gilberte, or else nothing at all, which was no worse, the proofs of another's friendship making all the more cruel those of her indifference. I transferred my hopes to the afternoon post. Even between the times at which letters were delivered I dared not leave the house, for she might be sending hers by a messenger. Then, the time coming at last when neither the postman nor a footman from the Swanns' could possibly appear that night, I must procrastinate my hope of being set at rest, and thus, because I believed that my sufferings were not destined to last, I was obliged, so to speak, incessantly to renew them. My disappointment was perhaps the same, but instead of just uniformly prolonging, as in the old days, an initial emotion, it began again several times daily, starting each time with an emotion so frequently renewed that it ended--it, so purely physical, so instantaneous a state--by becoming stabilised, so consistently that the strain of waiting having hardly time to relax before a fresh reason for waiting supervened, there was no longer a single minute in the day in which I was not in that state of anxiety which it is so difficult to bear even for an hour. So my punishment was infinitely more cruel than in those New Year holidays long ago, because this time there was in me, instead of the acceptance, pure and simple, of that punishment, the hope, at every moment, of seeing it come to an end. And yet at this state of acceptance I ultimately arrived; then I understood that it must be final, and I renounced Gilberte for ever, in the interests of my love itself and because I hoped above all that she would not retain any contemptuous memory of me. Indeed, from that moment, so that she should not be led to suppose any sort of lover's spite on my part, when she made appointments for me to see her I used often to accept them and then, at the last moment, write to her that I was prevented from coming, but with the same protestations of my disappointment that I should have made to anyone whom I had not wished to see. These expressions of regret, which we keep as a rule for people who do not matter, would do more, I imagined, to persuade Gilberte of my indifference than would the tone of indifference which we affect only to those whom we love. When, better than by mere words, by a course of action indefinitely repeated, I should have proved to her that I had no appetite for seeing her, perhaps she would discover once again an appetite for seeing me. Alas! I was doomed to failure; to attempt, by ceasing to see her, to reawaken in her that inclination to see me was to lose her for ever; first of all, because, when it began to revive, if I wished it to last I must not give way to it at once; besides, the most agonising hours would then have passed; it was at this very moment that she was indispensable to me, and I should have liked to be able to warn her that what presently she would have to assuage, by the act of seeing me again, would be a grief so far diminished as to be no longer (what a moment ago it would still have been), nor the thought of putting an end to it, a motive towards surrender, reconciliation, further meetings. And then again, later on, when I should at last be able safely to confess to Gilberte (so far would her liking for me have regained its strength) my liking for her, the latter, not having been able to resist the strain of so long a separation, would have ceased to exist; Gilberte would have become immaterial to me. I knew this, but I could not explain it to her; she would have assumed that if I was pretending that I should cease to love her if I remained for too long without seeing her, that was solely in order that she might summon me back to her at once. In the meantime, what made it easier for me to sentence myself to this separation was the fact that (in order to make it quite clear to her that despite my protestations to the contrary it was my own free-will and not any conflicting engagement, not the state of my health that prevented me from seeing her), whenever I knew beforehand that Gilberte would not be in the house, was going out somewhere with a friend and would not be home for dinner, I went to see Mme. Swann who had once more become to me what she had been at the time when I had such difficulty in seeing her daughter and (on days when the latter was not coming to the Champs-Elysées) used to repair to the Allée des Acacias. In this way I should be hearing about Gilberte, and could be certain that she would in due course hear about me, and in terms which would shew her that I was not interested in her. And I found, as all those who suffer find, that my melancholy condition might have been worse. For being free at any time to enter the habitation in which Gilberte dwelt, I constantly reminded myself, for all that I was firmly resolved to make no use of that privilege, that if ever my pain grew too sharp there was a way of making it cease. I was not unhappy, save only from day to day. And even that is an exaggeration. How many times in an hour (but now without that anxious expectancy which had strained every nerve of me in the first weeks after our quarrel, before I had gone again to the Swanns') did I not repeat to myself the words of the letter which, one day soon, Gilberte would surely send, would perhaps even bring to me herself. The perpetual vision of that imagined happiness helped me to endure the desolation of my real happiness. With women who do not love us, as with the "missing", the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent our continuing to wait for news. We live on tenter-hooks, starting at the slightest sound; the mother whose son has gone to sea on some perilous voyage of discovery sees him in imagination every moment, long after the fact of his having perished has been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health. And this strain of waiting, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son is no more, to forget gradually and to survive his loss, or else it kills her. On the other hand, my grief found consolation in the idea that my love must profit by it. Each visit that I paid to Mme. Swann without seeing Gilberte was a cruel punishment, but I felt that it correspondingly enhanced the idea that Gilberte had of me. Besides, if I always took care, before going to see Mme. Swann, that there should be no risk of her daughter's appearing, that arose, it is true, from my determination to break with her, but no less perhaps from that hope of reconciliation which overlay my intention to renounce her (very few of such intentions are absolute, at least in a continuous form, in this human soul of ours, one of whose laws, confirmed by the unlooked-for wealth of illustration that memory supplies, is intermittence), and hid from me all that in it was unbearably cruel. As for that hope, I saw clearly how far it was chimerical. I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that, at any moment, a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him the whole of his fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves. Now my hope remained more intact--while at the same time our separation became more effectual--if I refrained from meeting Gilberte. If I had found myself face to face with her in her mother's drawing-room, we might perhaps have uttered irrevocable words which would have rendered our breach final, killed my hope and, on the other hand, by creating a fresh anxiety, reawakened my love and made resignation harder. Ever so long ago, before I had even thought of breaking with her daughter, Mme. Swann had said to me: "It is all very well your coming to see Gilberte; I should like you to come sometimes for my sake, not to my 'kettledrums', which would bore you because there is such a crowd, but on the other days, when you will always find me at home if you come fairly late." So that I might be thought, when I came to see her, to be yielding only after a long resistance to a desire which she had expressed in the past. And very late in the afternoon, when it was quite dark, almost at the hour at which my parents would be sitting down to dinner, I would set out to pay Mme. Swann a visit, in the course of which I knew that I should not see Gilberte, and yet should be thinking only of her. In that quarter, then looked upon as remote, of a Paris darker than Paris is to-day, where even in the centre there was no electric light in the public thoroughfares and very little in private houses, the lamps of a drawing-room situated on the ground level, or but slightly raised above it, as were the rooms in which Mme. Swann generally received her visitors, were enough to lighten the street, and to make the passer-by raise his eyes, connecting with their glow, as with its apparent though hidden cause, the presence outside the door of a string of smart broughams. This passer-by was led to believe, not without a certain emotion, that a modification had been effected in this mysterious cause, when he saw one of the carriages begin to move; but it was merely a coachman who, afraid of his horses' catching cold, started them now and again on a brisk walk, all the more impressive because the rubber-tired wheels gave the sound of their hooves a background of silence from which it stood out more distinct and more explicit. The "winter-garden", of which in those days the passer-by generally caught a glimpse, in whatever street he might be walking, if the drawing-room did not stand too high above the pavement, is to be seen to-day only in photogravures in the gift-books of P. J. Stahl, where, in contrast to the infrequent floral decorations of the Louis XVI drawing-rooms now in fashion--a single rose or a Japanese iris in a long-necked vase of crystal into which it would be impossible to squeeze a second--it seems, because of the profusion of indoor plants which people had then, and of the absolute want of style in their arrangement, as though it must have responded in the ladies whose houses it adorned to some living and delicious passion for botany rather than to any cold concern for lifeless decoration. It suggested to one, only on a larger scale, in the houses of those days, those tiny, portable hothouses laid out on New Year's morning beneath the lighted lamp--for the children were always too impatient to wait for daylight--among all the other New Year's presents but the loveliest of them all, consoling them with its real plants which they could tend as they grew for the bareness of the winter soil; and even more than those little houses themselves, those winter gardens were like the hot-house that the children could see there at the same time, portrayed in a delightful book, another of their presents, and one which, for all that it was given not to them but to Mlle. Lili, the heroine of the story, enchanted them to such a pitch that even now, when they are almost old men and women, they ask themselves whether, in those fortunate years, winter was not the loveliest of the seasons. And inside there, beyond the winter-garden, through the various kinds of arborescence which from the street made the lighted window appear like the glass front of one of those children's playthings, pictured or real, the passer-by, drawing himself up on tiptoe, would generally observe a man in a frock coat, a gardenia or a carnation in his buttonhole, standing before a seated lady, both vaguely outlined, like two intaglios cut in a topaz, in the depths of the drawing-room atmosphere clouded by the samovar--then a recent importation--with steam which may very possibly be escaping from it still to-day, but to which, if it does, we are grown so accustomed now that no one notices it. Mme. Swann attached great importance to her "tea"; she thought that she shewed her originality and expressed her charm when she said to a man, "You will find me at home any day, fairly late; come to tea!" so that she allowed a sweet and delicate smile to accompany the words which she pronounced with a fleeting trace of English accent, and which her listener duly noted, bowing solemnly in acceptance, as though the invitation had been something important and uncommon which commanded deference and required attention. There was another reason, apart from those given already, for the flowers' having more than a merely ornamental part in Mme. Swann's drawing-room, and this reason pertained not to the period, but, in some degree, to the former life of Odette. A great courtesan, such as she had been, lives largely for her lovers, that is to say at home, which means that she comes in time to live for her home. The things that one sees in the house of a "respectable" woman, things which may of course appear to her also to be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost importance to the courtesan. The culminating point of her day is not the moment in which she dresses herself for all the world to see, but that in which she undresses herself for a man. She must be as smart in her wrapper, in her nightgown, as in her outdoor attire. Other women display their jewels, but as for her, she lives in the intimacy of her pearls. This kind of existence imposes on her as an obligation and ends by giving her a fondness for luxury which is secret, that is to say which comes near to being disinterested. Mme. Swann extended this to include her flowers. There was always beside her chair an immense bowl of crystal filled to the brim with Parma violets or with long white daisy-petals scattered upon the water, which seemed to be testifying, in the eyes of the arriving guest, to some favourite and interrupted occupation, such as the cup of tea which Mme. Swann would, for her own amusement, have been drinking there by herself; an occupation more intimate still and more mysterious, so much so that one felt oneself impelled to apologise on seeing the flowers exposed there by her side, as one would have apologised for looking at the title of the still open book which would have revealed to one what had just been read by--and so, perhaps, what was still in the mind of Odette. And unlike the book the flowers were living things; it was annoying, when one entered the room to pay Mme. Swann a visit, to discover that she was not alone, or if one came home with her not to find the room empty, so prominent a place in it, enigmatic and intimately associated with hours in the life of their mistress of which one knew nothing, did those flowers assume which had not been made ready for Odette's visitors but, as it were, forgotten there by her, had held and would hold with her again private conversations which one was afraid of disturbing, the secret of which one tried in vain to read, fastening one's eyes on the moist purple, the still liquid water-colour of the Parma violets. By the end of October Odette would begin to come home with the utmost punctuality for tea, which was still known, at that time, as "five-o'clock tea", having once heard it said, and being fond of repeating that if Mme. Verdurin had been able to form a salon it was because people were always certain of finding her at home at the same hour. She imagined that she herself had one also, of the same kind, but freer, _senza rigore_ as she used to say. She saw herself figuring thus as a sort of Lespinasse, and believed that she had founded a rival salon by taking from the du Deffant of the little group several of her most attractive men, notably Swann himself, who had followed her in her secession and into her retirement, according to a version for which one can understand that she had succeeded in gaining credit among her more recent friends, ignorant of what had passed, though without convincing herself. But certain favourite parts are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten. On days on which Mme. Swann had not left the house, one found her in a wrapper of _crêpe-de-Chine_, white as the first snows of winter, or, it might be, in one of those long pleated garments of _mousseline-de-soie_, which seemed nothing more than a shower of white or rosy petals, and would be regarded to-day as hardly suitable for winter, though quite wrongly. For these light fabrics and soft colours gave to a woman--in the stifling warmth of the drawing-rooms of those days, with their heavily curtained doors, rooms of which the most effective thing that the society novelists of the time could find to say was that they were "exquisitely cushioned"--the same air of coolness that they gave to the roses which were able to stay in the room there by her side, despite the winter, in the glowing flesh tints of their nudity, as though it were already spring. By reason of the muffling of all sound in the carpets, and of the remoteness of her cosy retreat, the lady of the house, not being apprised of your entry as she is to-day, would continue to read almost until you were standing before her chair, which enhanced still further that sense of the romantic, that charm of a sort of secret discovery, which we find to-day in the memory of those gowns, already out of fashion even then, which Mme. Swann was perhaps alone in not having discarded, and which give us the feeling that the woman who wore them must have been the heroine of a novel because most of us have scarcely set eyes on them outside the pages of certain of Henry Gréville's tales. Odette had, at this time, in her drawing-room, when winter began, chrysanthemums of enormous size and of a variety of colours such as Swann, in the old days, certainly never saw in her drawing-room in the Rue La Pérouse. My admiration for them--when I went to pay Mme. Swann one of those melancholy visits during which, prompted by my sorrow, I discovered in her all the mystical poetry of her character as the mother of that Gilberte to whom she would say on the morrow: "Your friend came to see me yesterday,"--sprang, no doubt, from my sense that, rose-pale like the Louis XIV silk that covered her chairs, snow white like her _crêpe-de-Chine_ wrapper, or of a metallic red like her samovar, they superimposed upon the decoration of the room another, a supplementary scheme of decoration, as rich, as delicate in its colouring, but one which was alive and would last for a few days only. But I was touched to find that these chrysanthemums appeared less ephemeral than, one might almost say, lasting, when I compared them with the tones, as pink, as coppery, which the setting sun so gorgeously displays amid the mists of a November afternoon, and which, after seeing them, before I had entered the house, fade from the sky, I found again inside, prolonged, transposed on to the flaming palette of the flowers. Like the fires caught and fixed by a great colourist from the impermanence of the atmosphere and the sun, so that they should enter and adorn a human dwelling, they invited me, those chrysanthemums, to put away all my sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture during that "tea-time" the too fleeting joys of November, of which they set ablaze all around me the intimate and mystical glory. Alas, it was not in the conversations to which I must listen that I could hope to attain to that glory; they had but little in common with it. Even with Mme. Cottard, and although it was growing late, Mme. Swann would assume her most caressing manner to say: "Oh, no, it's not late, really; you mustn't look at the clock; that's not the right time; it's stopped; you can't possibly have anything else to do now, why be in such a hurry?" as she pressed a final tartlet upon the Professor's wife, who was gripping her card-case in readiness for flight. "One simply can't tear oneself away from this house!" observed Mme. Bontemps to Mme. Swann, while Mme. Cottard, in her astonishment at hearing her own thought put into words, exclaimed: "Why, that's just what I always say myself, what I tell my own little judge, in the court of conscience!" winning the applause of the gentlemen from the Jockey Club, who had been profuse in their salutations, as though confounded at such an honour's being done them, when Mme. Swann had introduced them to this common and by no means attractive little woman, who kept herself, when confronted with Odette's brilliant friends, in reserve, if not on what she herself called "the defensive", for she always used stately language to describe the simplest happenings. "I should never have suspected it," was Mme. Swann's comment, "three Wednesdays running you've played me false." "That's quite true, Odette; it's simply ages, it's an eternity since I saw you last. You see, I plead guilty; but I must tell you," she went on with a vague suggestion of outraged modesty, for although a doctor's wife she would never have dared to speak without periphrasis of rheumatism or of a chill on the kidneys, "that I have had a lot of little troubles. As we all have, I dare say. And besides that I've had a crisis among my masculine domestics. I'm sure, I'm no more imbued with a sense of my own authority than most ladies; still I've been obliged, just to make an example you know, to give my Vatel notice; I believe he was looking out anyhow for a more remunerative place. But his departure nearly brought about the resignation of my entire ministry. My own maid refused to stay in the house a moment longer; oh, we have had some Homeric scenes. However I held fast to the reins through thick and thin; the whole affair's been a perfect lesson, which won't be lost on me, I can tell you. I'm afraid I'm boring you with all these stories about servants, but you know as well as I do what a business it is when one is obliged to set about rearranging one's household. "Aren't we to see anything of your delicious child?" she wound up. "No, my delicious child is dining with a friend," replied Mme. Swann, and then, turning to me: "I believe she's written to you, asking you to come and see her to-morrow. And your babies?" she went on to Mme. Cottard. I breathed a sigh of relief. These words by which Mme. Swann proved to me that I could see Gilberte whenever I chose gave me precisely the comfort which I had come to seek, and which at that time made my visits to Mme. Swann so necessary. "No, I'm afraid not; I shall write to her, anyhow, this evening. Gilberte and I never seem to see one another now," I added, pretending to attribute our separation to some mysterious agency, which gave me a further illusion of being in love, supported as well by the affectionate way in which I spoke of Gilberte and she of me. "You know, she's simply devoted to you," said Mme. Swann. "Really, you won't come to-morrow?" Suddenly my heart rose on wings; the thought had just struck me--"After all, why shouldn't I, since it's her own mother who suggests it?" But with the thought I fell back into my old depression. I was afraid now lest, when she saw me again, Gilberte might think that my indifference of late had been feigned, and it seemed wiser to prolong our separation. During these asides Mme. Bontemps had been complaining of the insufferable dulness of politicians' wives, for she pretended to find everyone too deadly or too stupid for words, and to deplore her husband's official position. "Do you mean to say you can shake hands with fifty doctors' wives, like that, one after the other?" she exclaimed to Mme. Cottard, who, unlike her, was full of the kindest feelings for everybody and of determination to do her duty in every respect. "Ah! you're a law-abiding woman! You see, in my case, at the Ministry, don't you know, I simply have to keep it up, of course. It's too much for me, I can tell you; you know what those officials' wives are like, it's all I can do not to put my tongue out at them. And my niece Albertine is just like me. You really wouldn't believe the impudence that girl has. Last week, on my 'day', I had the wife of the Under Secretary of State for Finance, who told us that she knew nothing at all about cooking. 'But surely, ma'am,' my niece chipped in with her most winning smile, 'you ought to know everything about it, after all the dishes your father had to wash.'" "Oh, I do love that story; I think it's simply exquisite!" cried Mme. Swann. "But certainly on the Doctor's consultation days you should make a point of being 'at home', among your flowers and books and all your pretty things," she urged Mme. Cottard. "Straight out like that! Bang! Right in the face; bang! She made no bones about it, I can tell you! And she'd never said a word to me about it, the little wretch; she's as cunning as a monkey. You are lucky to be able to control yourself; I do envy people who can hide what is in their minds." "But I've no need to do that, Mme. Bontemps, I'm not so hard to please," Mme. Cottard gently expostulated. "For one thing, I'm not in such a privileged position," she went on, slightly raising her voice as was her custom, as though she were underlining the point of her remark, whenever she slipped into the conversation any of those delicate courtesies, those skilful flatteries which won her the admiration and assisted the career of her husband. "And besides I'm only too glad to do anything that can be of use to the Professor." "But, my dear, it isn't what one's glad to do; it's what one is able to do! I expect you're not nervous. Do you know, whenever I see the War Minister's wife making faces, I start copying her at once. It's a dreadful thing to have a temperament like mine." "To be sure, yes," said Mme. Cottard, "I've heard people say that she had a twitch; my husband knows someone else who occupies a very high position, and it's only natural, when gentlemen get talking together..." "And then, don't you know, it's just the same with the Chief of the Registry; he's a hunchback. Whenever he comes to see me, before he's been in the room five minutes my fingers are itching to stroke his hump. My husband says I'll cost him his place. What if I do! A fig for the Ministry! Yes, a fig for the Ministry! I should like to have that printed as a motto on my note-paper. I can see I am shocking you; you're so frightfully proper, but I must say there's nothing amuses me like a little devilry now and then. Life would be dreadfully monotonous without it." And she went on talking about the Ministry all the time, as though it had been Mount Olympus. To change the conversation, Mme. Swann turned to Mme. Cottard: "But you're looking very smart to-day. Redfern _fecit_?" "No, you know, I always swear by Rauthnitz. Besides, it's only an old thing I've had done up." "Not really! It's charming!" "Guess how much. . . . No, change the first figure!" "You don't say so! Why, that's nothing; it's given away! Three times that at least, I should have said." "You see how history comes to be written," apostrophised the doctor's wife. And pointing to a neck-ribbon which had been a present from Mme. Swann; "Look, Odette! Do you recognise this?" Through the gap between a pair of curtains a head peeped with ceremonious deference, making a playful pretence of being afraid of disturbing the party; it was Swann. "Odette, the Prince d'Agrigente is with me in the study. He wants to know if he may pay his respects to you. What am I to tell him?" "Why, that I shall be delighted," Odette would reply, secretly flattered, but without losing anything of the composure which came to her all the more easily since she had always, even in her "fast" days, been accustomed to entertain men of fashion. Swann disappeared to deliver the message, and would presently return with the Prince, unless in the meantime Mme. Verdurin had arrived. When he married Odette Swann had insisted on her ceasing to frequent the little clan. (He had several good reasons for this stipulation, though, had he had none, he would have made it just the same in obedience to a law of ingratitude which admits no exception, and proves that every "go-between" is either lacking in foresight or else singularly disinterested.) He had conceded only that Odette and Mme. Verdurin might exchange visits once a year, and even this seemed excessive to some of the "faithful", indignant at the insult offered to the "Mistress" who for so many years had treated Odette and even Swann himself as the spoiled children of her house. For if it contained false brethren who "failed" upon certain evenings in order that they might secretly accept an invitation from Odette, ready, in the event of discovery, with the excuse that they were curious to meet Bergotte (although the Mistress assured them that he never went to the Swanns', and even if he did had no vestige of talent, really--in spite of which she was making the most strenuous efforts, to quote one of her favourite expressions, to "attract" him), the little group had its "die-hards" also. And these, though ignorant of those conventional refinements which often dissuade people from the extreme attitude one would have liked to see them adopt in order to annoy some one else, would have wished Mme. Verdurin, but had never managed to prevail upon her to sever all connexion with Odette, and thus deprive her of the satisfaction of saying, with a mocking laugh: "We go to the Mistress's very seldom now, since the Schism. It was all very well while my husband was still a bachelor, but when one is married, you know, it isn't always so easy. . . . If you must know, M. Swann can't abide old Ma Verdurin, and he wouldn't much like the idea of my going there regularly, as I used to. And I, as a dutiful spouse, don't you see . . .?" Swann would accompany his wife to their annual evening there but would take care not to be in the room when Mme. Verdurin came to call. And so, if the "Mistress" was in the drawing-room, the Prince d'Agrigente would enter it alone. Alone, too, he was presented to her by Odette, who preferred that Mme. Verdurin should be left in ignorance of the names of her humbler guests, and so might, seeing more than one strange face in the room, be led to believe that she was mixing with the cream of the aristocracy, a device which proved so far successful that Mme. Verdurin said to her husband, that evening, with profound contempt: "Charming people, her friends! I met all the fine flower of the Reaction!" Odette was living, with respect to Mme. Verdurin, under a converse illusion. Not that the latter's salon had ever begun, at that time, to develop into what we shall one day see it to have become. Mme. Verdurin had not yet reached the period of incubation in which one dispenses with one's big parties, where the few brilliant specimens recently acquired would be lost in too numerous a crowd, and prefers to wait until the generative force of the ten righteous whom one has succeeded in attracting shall have multiplied those ten seventy-fold. As Odette was not to be long now in doing, Mme. Verdurin did indeed entertain the idea of "Society" as her final objective, but her zone of attack was as yet so restricted, and moreover so remote from that in which Odette had some chance of arriving at an identical goal, of breaking the line of defence, that the latter remained absolutely ignorant of the strategic plans which the "Mistress" was elaborating. And it was with the most perfect sincerity that Odette, when anyone spoke to her of Mme. Verdurin as a snob, would answer, laughing, "Oh, no, quite the opposite! For one thing, she never gets a chance of being a snob; she doesn't know anyone. And then, to do her justice, I must say that she seems quite pleased not to know anyone. No, what she likes are her Wednesdays, and people who talk well." And in her hearts of hearts she envied Mme. Verdurin (for all that she did not despair of having herself, in so eminent a school, succeeded in acquiring them) those arts to which the "Mistress" attached such paramount importance, albeit they did but discriminate between shades of the Non-existent, sculpture the void, and were, properly speaking, the Arts of Nonentity: to wit those, in the lady of a house, of knowing how to "bring people together", how to "group", to "draw out", to "keep in the background", to act as a "connecting link". In any case, Mme. Swann's friends were impressed when they saw in her house a lady of whom they were accustomed to think only as in her own, in an inseparable setting of her guests, amid the whole of her little group which they were astonished to behold thus suggested, summarised, assembled, packed into a single armchair in the bodily form of the "Mistress", the hostess turned visitor, muffled in her cloak with its grebe trimming, as shaggy as the white skins that carpeted that drawing-room embowered in which Mme. Verdurin was a drawing-room in herself. The more timid among the women thought it prudent to retire, and using the plural, as people do when they mean to hint to the rest of the room that it is wiser not to tire a convalescent who is out of bed for the first time: "Odette," they murmured, "we are going to leave you." They envied Mme. Cottard, whom the "Mistress" called by her Christian name. "Can I drop you anywhere?" Mme. Verdurin asked her, unable to bear the thought that one of the faithful was going to remain behind instead of following her from the room. "Oh, but this lady has been so very kind as to say, she'll take me," replied Mme. Cottard, not wishing to appear to be forgetting, when approached by a more illustrious personage, that she had accepted the offer which Mme. Bontemps had made of driving her home behind her cockaded coachman. "I must say that I am always specially grateful to the friends who are so kind as to take me with them in their vehicles. It is a regular godsend to me, who have no Automedon." "Especially," broke in the "Mistress", who felt that she must say something, since she knew Mme. Bontemps slightly and had just invited her to her Wednesdays, "as at Mme. de Crécy's house you're not very near home. Oh, good gracious, I shall never get into the way of saying Mme. Swann!" It was a recognised pleasantry in the little clan, among those who were not over endowed with wit, to pretend that they could never grow used to saying "Mme. Swann." "I have been so accustomed to saying Mme. de Crécy that I nearly went wrong again!" Only Mme. Verdurin, when she spoke to Odette, was not content with the nearly, but went wrong on purpose. "Don't you feel afraid, Odette, living out in the wilds like this? I'm sure I shouldn't feel at all comfortable, coming home after dark. Besides, it's so damp. It can't be at all good for your husband's eczema. You haven't rats in the house, I hope!" "Oh, dear no. What a horrid idea!" "That's a good thing; I was told you had. I'm glad to know it's not true, because I have a perfect horror of the creatures, and I should never have come to see you again. Good-bye, my dear child, we shall meet again soon; you know what a pleasure it is to me to see you. You don't know how to put your chrysanthemums in water," she went on, as she prepared to leave the room, Mme. Swann having risen to escort her. "They are Japanese flowers; you must arrange them the same way as the Japanese." "I do not agree with Mme. Verdurin, although she is the Law and the Prophets to me in all things! There's no one like you, Odette, for finding such lovely chrysanthemums, or chrysanthema rather, for it seems that's what we ought to call them now," declared Mme. Cottard as soon as the "Mistress" had shut the door behind her. "Dear Mme. Verdurin is not always very kind about other people's flowers," said Odette sweetly. "Whom do you go to, Odette," asked Mme. Cottard, to forestall any further criticism of the "Mistress". "Lemaître? I must confess, the other day in Lemaître's window I saw a huge, great pink bush which made me do something quite mad." But modesty forbade her to give any more precise details as to the price of the bush, and she said merely that the Professor, "and you know, he's not at all a quick-tempered man," had "waved his sword in the air" and told her that she "didn't know what money meant." "No, no, I've no regular florist except Debac." "Nor have I," said Mme. Cottard, "but I confess that I am unfaithful to him now and then with Lachaume." "Oh, you forsake him for Lachaume, do you; I must tell Debac that," retorted Odette, always anxious to shew her wit, and to lead the conversation in her own house, where she felt more at her ease than in the little clan. "Besides, Lachaume is really becoming too dear; his prices are quite excessive, don't you know; I find his prices impossible!" she added, laughing. Meanwhile Mme. Bontemps, who had been heard a hundred times to declare that nothing would induce her to go to the Verdurins', delighted at being asked to the famous Wednesdays, was planning in her own mind how she could manage to attend as many of them as possible. She was not aware that Mme. Verdurin liked people not to miss a single one; also she was one of those people whose company is but little sought, who, when a hostess invites them to a series of parties, do not accept and go to them without more ado, like those who know that if is always a pleasure to see them, whenever they have a moment to spare and feel inclined to go out; people of her type deny themselves it may be the first evening and the third, imagining that their absence will be noticed, and save themselves up for the second and fourth, unless it should happen that, having heard from a trustworthy source that the third is to be a particularly brilliant party, they reverse the original order, assuring their hostess that "most unfortunately, we had another engagement last week." So Mme. Bontemps was calculating how many Wednesdays there could still be left before Easter, and by what means she might manage to secure one extra, and yet not appear to be thrusting herself upon her hostess. She relied upon Mme. Cottard, whom she would have with her in the carriage going home, to give her a few hints. "Oh, Mme. Bontemps, I see you getting up to go; it is very bad of you to give the signal for flight like that! You owe me some compensation for not turning up last Thursday. . . . Come, sit down again, just for a minute. You can't possibly be going anywhere else before dinner. Really, you won't let yourself be tempted?" went on Mme. Swann, and, as she held out a plate of cakes, "You know, they're not at all bad, these little horrors. They don't look nice, but just taste one, I know you'll like it." "On the contrary, they look quite delicious," broke in Mme. Cottard. "In your house, Odette, one is never short of victuals. I have no need to ask to see the trade-mark; I know you get everything from Rebattet. I must say that I am more eclectic. For sweet biscuits and everything of that sort I repair, as often as not, to Bourbonneux. But I agree that they simply don't know what an ice means. Rebattet for everything iced, and syrups and sorbets; they're past-masters. As my husband would say, they're the _ne plus ultra,_" "Oh, but we just make these in the house. You won't, really?" "I shan't be able to eat a scrap of dinner," pleaded Mme. Bontemps, "but I will just sit down again for a moment; you know, I adore talking to a clever woman like you." "You will think me highly indiscreet, Odette, but I should so like to know what you thought of the hat Mme. Trombert had on. I know, of course, that big hats are the fashion just now. All the same, wasn't it just the least little bit exaggerated? And compared to the hat she came to see me in the other day, the one she had on just now was microscopic!" "Oh no, I am not at all clever," said Odette, thinking that this sounded well. "I am a perfect simpleton, I believe everything people say, and worry myself to death over the least thing." And she insinuated that she had, just at first, suffered terribly from the thought of having married a man like Swann, who had a separate life of his own and was unfaithful to her. Meanwhile the Prince d'Agrigente, having caught the words "I am not at all clever", thought it incumbent on him to protest; unfortunately he had not the knack of repartee. "Tut, tut, tut, tut!" cried Mme. Bontemps, "Not clever; you!" "That's just what I was saying to myself--'What do I hear?'," the Prince clutched at this straw, "My ears must have played me false!" "No, I assure you," went on Odette, "I am really just an ordinary woman, very easily shocked, full of prejudices, living in my own little groove and dreadfully ignorant." And then, in case he had any news of the Baron de Charlus, "Have you seen our dear Baronet?" she asked him. "You, ignorant!" cried Mme. Bontemps. "Then I wonder what you'd say of the official world, all those wives of Excellencies who can talk of nothing but their frocks. . . . Listen to this, my friend; not more than a week ago I happened to mention _Lohengrin_ to the Education Minister's wife. She stared at me, and said '_Lohengrin?_ Oh, yes, the new review at the Folies-Bergères. I hear it's a perfect scream!' What do you say to that, eh? You can't help yourself; when people say things like that it makes your blood boil. I could have struck her. Because I have a bit of a temper of my own. What do you say, sir;" she turned to me, "was I not right?" "Listen," said Mme. Cottard, "people can't help answering a little off the mark when they're asked a thing like that point blank, without any warning. I know something about it, because Mme. Verdurin also has a habit of putting a pistol to your head." "Speaking of Mme. Verdurin," Mme. Bontemps asked Mme. Cottard, "do you know who will be there on Wednesday? Oh, I've just remembered that we've accepted an invitation for next Wednesday. You wouldn't care to dine with us on Wednesday week? We could go on together to Mme. Verdurin's. I should never dare to go there by myself; I don't know why it is, that great lady always terrifies me." "I'll tell you what it is," replied Mme. Cottard, "what frightens you about Mme. Verdurin is her organ. But you see everyone can't have such a charming organ as Mme. Swann. Once you've found your tongue, as the 'Mistress' says, the ice will soon be broken. For she's a very easy person, really, to get on with. But I can quite understand what you feel; it's never pleasant to find oneself for the first time in a strange country." "Won't you dine with us, too?" said Mme. Bontemps to Mme. Swann. "After dinner we could all go to the Verdurins together, 'do a Verdurin'; and even if it means that the 'Mistress' will stare me out of countenance and never ask me to the house again, once we are there we'll just sit by ourselves and have a quiet talk, I'm sure that's what I should like best." But this assertion can hardly have been quite truthful, for Mme. Bontemps went on to ask: "Who do you think will be there on Wednesday week? What will they be doing? There won't be too big a crowd, I hope!" "I certainly shan't be there," said Odette. "We shall just look in for a minute on the last Wednesday of all. If you don't mind waiting till then----" But Mme. Bontemps did not appear to be tempted by the proposal. Granted that the intellectual distinction of a house and its smartness are generally in inverse rather than direct ratio, one must suppose, since Swann found Mme. Bontemps attractive, that any forfeiture of position once accepted has the consequence of making us less particular with regard to the people among whom we have resigned ourselves to finding entertainment, less particular with regard to their intelligence as to everything else about them. And if this be true, men, like nations, must see their culture and even their language disappear with their independence. One of the effects of this indulgence is to aggravate the tendency which after a certain age we have towards finding pleasure in speeches that are a homage to our own turn of mind, to our weaknesses, an encouragement to us to yield to them; that is the age at which a great artist prefers to the company of original minds that of pupils who have nothing in common with him save the letter of his doctrine, who listen to him and offer incense; at which a man or woman of mark, who is living entirely for love, will find that the most intelligent person in a gathering is one perhaps of no distinction, but one who has shewn by some utterance that he can understand and approve what is meant by an existence devoted to gallantry, and has thus pleasantly excited the voluptuous instincts of the lover or mistress; it was the age, too, at which Swann, in so far as he had become the husband of Odette, enjoyed hearing Mme. Bontemps say how silly it was to have nobody in one's house but duchesses (concluding from that, quite the contrary of what he would have decided in the old days at the Verdurins', that she was a good creature, extremely sensible and not at all a snob) and telling her stories which made her "die, laughing" because she had not heard them before, although she always "saw the point" at once, liked flattering her for his own amusement. "Then the Doctor is not mad about flowers, like you?" Mme. Swann asked Mme. Cottard. "Oh, well, you know, my husband is a sage; he practises moderation in all things. Yes, I must admit, he has a passion." Her eye aflame with malice, joy, curiosity, "And what is that, pray?" inquired Mme. Bontemps. Quite simply Mme. Cottard answered her, "Reading." "Oh, that's a very restful passion in a husband!" cried Mme. Bontemps suppressing an impish laugh. "When the Doctor gets a book in his hands, you know!" "Well, that needn't alarm you much . . ." "But it does, for his eyesight. I must go now and look after him, Odette, and I shall come back on the very first opportunity and knock at your door. Talking of eyesight, have you heard that the new house Mme. Verdurin has just bought is to be lighted by electricity? I didn't get that from my own little secret service, you know, but from quite a different source; it was the electrician himself, Mildé, who told me. You see, I quote my authorities! Even the bedrooms, he says, are to have electric lamps with shades which will filter the light. It is evidently a charming luxury, for those who can afford it. But it seems that our contemporaries must absolutely have the newest thing if it's the only one of its kind in the world. Just fancy, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine has had the telephone installed in her house! She can order things from her tradesmen without having to go out of doors! I confess that I've made the most bare-faced stratagems to get permission to go there one day, just to speak into the instrument. It's very tempting, but more in a friend's house than at home. I don't think I should like to have the telephone in my establishment. Once the first excitement is over, it must be a perfect racket going on all the time. Now, Odette, I must be off; you're not to keep Mme. Bontemps any longer, she's looking after me. I must absolutely tear myself away; you're making me behave in a nice way, I shall be getting home after my husband!" And for myself also it was time to return home, before I had tasted those wintry delights of which the chrysanthemums had seemed to me to be the brilliant envelope. These pleasures had not appeared, and yet Mme. Swann did not look as though she expected anything more. She allowed the servants to carry away the tea-things, as who should say "Time, please, gentlemen!" And at last she did say to me: "Really, must you go? Very well; good-bye!" I felt that I might have stayed there without encountering those unknown pleasures, and that my unhappiness was not the cause of my having to forego them. Were they to be found, then, situated not upon that beaten track of hours which leads one always to the moment of departure, but rather upon some cross-road unknown to me along which I ought to have digressed? At least, the object of my visit had been attained; Gilberte would know that I had come to see her parents when she was not at home, and that I had, as Mme. Cottard had incessantly assured me, "made a complete conquest, first shot, of Mme. Verdurin," whom, she added, she had never seen "make so much" of anyone. ("You and she must have hooked atoms.") She would know that I had spoken of her as was fitting, with affection, but that I had not that incapacity for living without our seeing one another which I believed to be at the root of the boredom that she had shewn at our last meetings. I had told Mme. Swann that I should not be able to see Gilberte again. I had said this as though I had finally decided not to see her any more. And the letter which I was going to send Gilberte would be framed on those lines. Only to myself, to fortify my courage, I proposed no more than a supreme and concentrated effort, lasting a few days only. I said to myself: "This is the last time that I shall refuse to meet her; I shall accept the next invitation." To make our separation less difficult to realise, I did not picture it to myself as final. But I knew very well that it would be. The first of January was exceptionally painful to me that winter. So, no doubt, is everything that marks a date and an anniversary when we are unhappy. But if our unhappiness is due to the loss of some dear friend, our suffering consists merely in an unusually vivid comparison of the present with the past. There was added to this, in my case, the unexpressed hope that Gilberte, having intended to leave me to take the first steps towards a reconciliation, and discovering that I had not taken them, had been waiting only for the excuse of New Year's Day to write to me, saying: "What is the matter? I am madly in love with you; come, and let us explain things properly; I cannot live without seeing you." As the last days of the old year went by, such a letter began to seem probable. It was, perhaps, nothing of the sort, but to make us believe that such a thing is probable the desire, the need that we have for it suffices. The soldier is convinced that a certain interval of time, capable of being indefinitely prolonged, will be allowed him before the bullet finds him, the thief before he is taken, men in general before they have to die. That is the amulet which preserves people--and sometimes peoples--not from danger but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in certain cases allows them to brave it without their actually needing to be brave. It is confidence of this sort, and with as little foundation, that sustains the lover who is counting upon a reconciliation, upon a letter. For me to cease to expect a letter it would have sufficed that I should have ceased to wish for one. However unimportant one may know that one is in the eyes of her whom one still loves, one attributes to her a series of thoughts (though their sum total be indifference) the intention to express those thoughts, a complication of her inner life in which one is the constant object possibly of her antipathy but certainly of her attention. But to imagine what was going on in Gilberte's mind I should have required simply the power to anticipate on that New Year's Day what I should feel on the first day of any of the years to come, when the attention or the silence or the affection or the coldness of Gilberte would pass almost unnoticed by me and I should not dream, should not even be able to dream of seeking a solution of problems which would have ceased to perplex me. When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within us. It radiates towards the beloved object, finds in her a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this shock of the repercussion of our own affection which we call the other's regard for ourselves, and which pleases us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves. New Year's Day rang out all its hours without there coming to me that letter from Gilberte. And as I received a few others containing greetings tardy or retarded by the overburdening of the mails at that season, on the third and fourth of January I hoped still, but my hope grew hourly more faint. Upon the days that followed I gazed through a mist of tears. This undoubtedly meant that, having been less sincere than I thought in my renunciation of Gilberte, I had kept the hope of a letter from her for the New Year. And seeing that hope exhausted before I had had time to shelter myself behind another, I suffered as would an invalid who had emptied his phial of morphia without having another within his reach. But perhaps also in my case--and these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, for a single feeling is often made up of contrary elements--the hope that I entertained of ultimately receiving a letter had brought to my mind's eye once again the image of Gilberte, had reawakened the emotions which the expectation of finding myself in her presence, the sight of her, her way of treating me had aroused in me before. The immediate possibility of a reconciliation had suppressed in me that faculty the immense importance of which we are apt to overlook: the faculty of resignation. Neurasthenics find it impossible to believe the friends who assure them that they will gradually recover their peace of mind if they will stay in bed and receive no letters, read no newspapers. They imagine that such a course will only exasperate their twitching nerves. And similarly lovers, who look upon it from their enclosure in a contrary state of mind, who have not begun yet to make trial of it, are unable to believe in the healing power of renunciation. In consequence of the violence of my palpitations, my doses of caffeine were reduced; the palpitations ceased. Whereupon I asked myself whether it was not to some extent the drug that had been responsible for the anguish that I had felt when I came near to quarrelling with Gilberte, an anguish which I had attributed, on every recurrence of it, to the distressing prospect of never seeing my friend again or of running the risk of seeing her only when she was a prey to the same ill-humour. But if this medicine had been at the root of the sufferings which my imagination must in that case have interpreted wrongly (not that there would be anything extraordinary in that, seeing that, among lovers, the most acute mental suffering assumes often the physical identity of the woman with whom they are living), it had been, in that sense, like the philtre which, long after they have drunk of it, continues to bind Tristan to Isolde. For the physical improvement which the reduction of my caffeine effected almost at once did not arrest the evolution of that grief which my absorption of the toxin had perhaps--if it had not created it--at any rate contrived to render more acute. Only, as the middle of the month of January approached, once my hopes of a letter on New Year's Day had been disappointed, once the additional disturbance that had come with their disappointment had grown calm, it was my old sorrow, that of "before the holidays", which began again. What was perhaps the most cruel thing about it was that I myself was its architect, unconscious, wilful, merciless and patient. The one thing that mattered, my relations with Gilberte, it was I who was labouring to make them impossible by gradually creating out of this prolonged separation from my friend, not indeed her indifference, but what would come to the same thing in the end, my own. It was to a slow and painful suicide of that part of me which was Gilberte's lover that I was goading myself with untiring energy, with a clear sense not only of what I was presently doing but of what must result from it in the future; I knew not only that after a certain time I should cease to love Gilberte, but also that she herself would regret it and that the attempts which she would then make to see me would be as vain as those that she was making now, no longer because I loved her too well but because I should certainly be in love with some other woman whom I should continue to desire, to wait for, through hours of which I should not dare to divert any particle of a second to Gilberte who would be nothing to me then. And no doubt at that very moment in which (since I was determined not to see her again, unless after a formal request for an explanation or a full confession of love on her part, neither of which was in the least degree likely to come to me now) I had already lost Gilberte, and loved her more than ever, and could feel all that she was to me better than in the previous year when, spending all my afternoons in her company, or as many as I chose, I believed that no peril threatened our friendship,--no doubt at that moment the idea that I should one day entertain identical feelings for another was odious to me, for that idea carried me away beyond the range of Gilberte, my love and my sufferings. My love, my sufferings in which through my tears I attempted to discern precisely what Gilberte was, and was obliged to recognise that they did not pertain exclusively to her but would, sooner or later, be some other woman's portion. So that--or such, at least, was my way of thinking then--we are always detached from our fellow-creatures; when a man loves one of them he feels that his love is not labelled with their two names, but may be born again in the future, may have been born already in the past for another and not for her. And in the time when he is not in love, if he makes up his mind philosophically as to what it is that is inconsistent in love, he will find that the love of which he can speak unmoved he did not, at the moment of speaking, feel, and therefore did not know, knowledge in these matters being intermittent and not outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment. That future in which I should not love Gilberte, which my sufferings helped me to divine although my imagination was not yet able to form a clear picture of it, certainly there would still have been time to warn Gilberte that it was gradually taking shape, that its coming was, if not imminent, at least inevitable, if she herself, Gilberte, did not come to my rescue and destroy in the germ my nascent indifference. How often was I not on the point of writing, or of going to Gilberte to tell her: "Take care. My mind is made up. What I am doing now is my supreme effort. I am seeing you now for the last time. Very soon I shall have ceased to love you." But to what end? By what authority should I have reproached Gilberte for an indifference which, not that I considered myself guilty on that count, I too manifested towards everything that was not herself? The last time! To me, that appeared as something of immense significance, because I was in love with Gilberte. On her it would doubtless have made just as much impression as those letters in which our friends ask whether they may pay us a visit before they finally leave the country, an offer which, like those made by tiresome women who are in love with us, we decline because we have pleasures of our own in prospect. The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains. Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte; she would not have understood me. We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind that are listening. My words would have come to her only in a distorted form, as though they had had to pass through the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my friend, unrecognisable, giving a foolish sound, having no longer any kind of meaning. The truth which one puts into one's words does not make a direct path for itself, is not supported by irresistible evidence. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in the words themselves. Then the political opponent who, despite all argument, every proof that he has advanced to damn the votary of the rival doctrine as a traitor, will himself have come to share the hated conviction by which he who once sought in vain to disseminate it is no longer bound. Then the masterpiece of literature which for the admirers who read it aloud seemed to make self-evident the proofs of its excellence, while to those who listened it presented only a senseless or common-place image, will by these too be proclaimed a masterpiece, but too late for the author to learn of their discovery. Similarly in love the barriers, do what one may, cannot be broken down from without by him whom they maddeningly exclude; it is when he is no longer concerned with them that suddenly, as the result of an effort directed from elsewhere, accomplished within the heart of her who did not love him, those barriers which he has charged without success will fall to no advantage. If I had come to Gilberte to tell her of my future indifference and the means of preventing it, she would have assumed from my action that my love for her, the need that I had of her, were even greater than I had supposed, and her distaste for the sight of me would thereby have been increased. And incidentally it is quite true that it was that love for her which helped me, by means of the incongruous states of mind which it successively produced in me, to foresee, more clearly than she herself could, the end of that love. And yet some such warning I might perhaps have addressed, by letter or with my own lips, to Gilberte, after a long enough interval, which would render her, it is true, less indispensable to me, but would also have proved to her that she was not so indispensable. Unfortunately certain persons--of good or evil intent--spoke of me to her in a fashion which must have led her to think that they were doing so at my request. Whenever I thus learned that Cottard, my own mother, even M. de Norpois had by a few ill-chosen words rendered useless all the sacrifice that I had just been making, wasted all the advantage of my reserve by giving me, wrongly, the appearance of having emerged from it, I was doubly angry. In the first place I could no longer reckon from any date but the present my laborious and fruitful abstention which these tiresome people had, unknown to me, interrupted and so brought to nothing. And not only that; I should have less pleasure in seeing Gilberte, who would think of me now no longer as containing myself in dignified resignation, but as plotting in the dark for an interview which she had scorned to grant me. I cursed all the idle chatter of people who so often, without any intention of hurting us or of doing us a service, for no reason, for talking's sake, often because we ourselves have not been able to refrain from talking in their presence, and because they are indiscreet (as we ourselves are), do us, at a crucial moment, so much harm. It is true that in the grim operation performed for the eradication of our love they are far from playing a part equal to that played by two persons who are in the habit, from excess of good nature in one and of malice in the other, of undoing everything at the moment when everything is on the point of being settled. But against these two persons we bear no such grudge as against the inopportune Cottards of this world, for the latter of them is the person whom we love and the former is ourself. Meanwhile, since on almost every occasion of my going to see her Mme. Swann would invite me to come to tea another day, with her daughter, and tell me to reply directly to her, I was constantly writing to Gilberte, and in this correspondence I did not choose the expressions which might, I felt, have won her over, sought only to carve out the easiest channel for the torrent of my tears. For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one's grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote; "I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult." I said also: "I shall probably not see you again;" I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen. For at the next request for a meeting which she would convey to me I should have again, as I had now, the courage not to yield, and, what with one refusal and another, I should gradually come to the moment when, by virtue of not having seen her again, I should not wish to see her. I wept, but I found courage enough to sacrifice, I tasted the sweets of sacrificing the happiness of being with her to the probability of seeming attractive to her one day, a day when, alas, my seeming attractive to her would be immaterial to me. Even the supposition, albeit so far from likely, that at this moment, as she had pretended during the last visit that I had paid her, she loved me, that what I took for the boredom which one feels in the company of a person of whom one has grown tired had been due only to a jealous susceptibility, to a feint of indifference analogous to my own, only rendered my decision less painful. It seemed to me that in years to come, when we had forgotten one another, when I should be able to look back and tell her that this letter which I was now in course of writing had not been for one moment sincere, she would answer, "What, you really did love me, did you? If you had only known how I waited for that letter, how I hoped that you were coming to see me, how I cried when I read it." The thought, while I was writing it, immediately on my return from her mother's house, that I was perhaps helping to bring about that very misunderstanding, that thought, by the sadness in which it plunged me, by the pleasure of imagining that I was loved by Gilberte, gave me the impulse to continue my letter. If, at the moment of leaving Mme. Swann, when her tea-party ended, I was thinking of what I was going to write to her daughter, Mme. Cottard, as she departed, had been filled with thoughts of a wholly different order. On her little "tour of inspection" she had not failed to congratulate Mme. Swann on the new "pieces", the recent "acquisitions" which caught the eye in her drawing-room. She could see among them some, though only a very few of the things that Odette had had in the old days in the Rue La Pérouse, for instance her animals carved in precious stones, her fetishes. For since Mme. Swann had picked up from a friend whose opinion she valued the word "dowdy"--which had opened to her a new horizon because it denoted precisely those things which a few years earlier she had considered "smart"--all those things had, one after another, followed into retirement the gilded trellis that had served as background to her chrysanthemums, innumerable boxes of sweets from Giroux's, and the coroneted note-paper (not to mention the coins of gilt pasteboard littered about on the mantelpieces, which, even before she had come to know Swann, a man of taste had advised her to sacrifice). Moreover in the artistic disorder, the studio-like confusion of the rooms, whose walls were still painted in sombre colours which made them as different as possible from the white-enamelled drawing-rooms in which, a little later, you were to find Mme. Swann installed, the Far East recoiled more and more before the invading forces of the eighteenth-century; and the cushions which, to make me "comfortable", Mme. Swann heaped up and buffeted into position behind my back were sprinkled with Louis XV garlands and not, as of old, with Chinese dragons. In the room in which she was usually to be found, and of which she would say, "Yes, I like this room; I use it a great deal. I couldn't live with a lot of horrid vulgar things swearing at me all the time; this is where I do my work----" though she never stated precisely at what she was working. Was it a picture? A book, perhaps, for the hobby of writing was beginning to become common among women who liked to "do something", not to be quite useless. She was surrounded by Dresden pieces (having a fancy for that sort of porcelain, which she would name with an English accent, saying in any connexion: "How pretty that is; it reminds me of Dresden flowers,"), and dreaded for them even more than in the old days for her grotesque figures and her flower-pots the ignorant handling of her servants who must expiate, every now and then, the anxiety that they had caused her by submitting to outbursts of rage at which Swann, the most courteous and considerate of masters, looked on without being shocked. Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those whom we love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us find those weaknesses charming. Rarely nowadays was it in one of those Japanese wrappers that Odette received her familiars, but rather in the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau gown whose flowering foam she made as though to caress where it covered her bosom, and in which she immersed herself, looked solemn, splashed and sported, with such an air of comfort, of a cool skin and long-drawn breath, that she seemed to look on these garments not as something decorative, a mere setting for herself, but as necessary, in the same way as her "tub" or her daily "outing", to satisfy the requirements of her style of beauty and the niceties of hygiene. She used often to say that she would go without bread rather than give up "art" and "having nice things about her", and that the burning of the "Gioconda" would distress her infinitely more than the destruction, by the same element, of "millions" of the people she knew. Theories which seemed paradoxical to her friends, but made her pass among them as a superior woman, and qualified her to receive a visit once a week from the Belgian Minister, so that in the little world whose sun she was everyone would have been greatly astonished to learn that elsewhere--at the Verdurins', for instance--she was reckoned a fool. It was this vivacity of expression that made Mme. Swann prefer men's society to women's. But when she criticised the latter it was always from the courtesan's standpoint, singling out the blemishes that might lower them in the esteem of men, a lumpy figure, a bad complexion, inability to spell, hairy legs, foul breath, pencilled eyebrows. But towards a woman who had shewn her kindness or indulgence in the past she was more lenient, especially if this woman were now in trouble. She would defend her warmly, saying: "People are not fair to her. I assure you, she's quite a nice woman really." It was not only the furniture of Odette's drawing-room, it was Odette herself that Mme. Cottard and all those who had frequented the society of Mme. de Crécy would have found it difficult, if they had not seen her for some little time, to recognise. She seemed to be so much younger. No doubt this was partly because she had grown stouter, was in better condition, seemed at once calmer, more cool, more restful, and also because the new way in which she braided her hair gave more breadth to a face which was animated by an application of pink powder, and into which her eyes and profile, formerly too prominent, seemed now to have been reabsorbed. But another reason for this change lay in the fact that, having reached the turning-point of life, Odette had at length discovered, or invented, a physiognomy of her own, an unalterable "character", a "style of beauty", and on her incoherent features--which for so long, exposed to every hazard, every weakness of the flesh, borrowing for a moment, at the slightest fatigue, from the years to come, a sort of flickering shadow of anility, had furnished her, well or ill, according to how she was feeling, how she was looking, with a countenance dishevelled, inconstant, formless and attractive--had now set this fixed type, as it were an immortal youthfulness. Swann had in his room, instead of the handsome photographs that were now taken of his wife, in all of which the same cryptic, victorious expression enabled one to recognise, in whatever dress and hat, her triumphant face and figure, a little old daguerreotype of her, quite plain, taken long before the appearance of this new type, so that the youth and beauty of Odette, which she had not yet discovered when it was taken, appeared to be missing from it. But it is probable that Swann, having remained constant, or having reverted to a different conception of her, enjoyed in the slender young woman with pensive eyes and tired features, caught in a pose between rest and motion, a more Botticellian charm. For he still liked to recognise in his wife one of Botticelli's figures. Odette, who on the other hand sought not to bring out but to make up for, to cover and conceal the points in herself that did not please her, what might perhaps to an artist express her "character" but in her woman's eyes were merely blemishes, would not have that painter mentioned in her presence. Swann had a wonderful scarf of oriental silk, blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly that worn by Our Lady in the _Magnificat._ But Mme. Swann refused to wear it. Once only she allowed her husband to order her a dress covered all over with daisies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots and campanulas, like that of the Primavera. And sometimes in the evening, when she was tired, he would quietly draw my attention to the way in which she was giving, quite unconsciously, to her pensive hands the uncontrolled, almost distraught movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot that the angel holds out to her, before writing upon the sacred page on which is already traced the word "_Magnificat_". But he added, "Whatever you do, don't say anything about it to her; if she knew she was doing it, she would change her pose at once." Save at these moments of involuntary relaxation, in which Swann essayed to recapture the melancholy cadence of Botticelli, Odette seemed now to be cut out in a single figure, wholly confined within a line which, following the contours of the woman, had abandoned the winding paths, the capricious re-entrants and salients, the radial points, the elaborate dispersions of the fashions of former days, but also, where it was her anatomy that went wrong by making unnecessary digressions within or without the ideal circumference traced for it, was able to rectify, by a bold stroke, the errors of nature, to make up, along a whole section of its course, for the failure as well of the human as of the textile element. The pads, the preposterous "bustle" had disappeared, as well as those tailed corsets which, projecting under the skirt and stiffened by rods of whalebone, had so long amplified Odette with an artificial stomach and had given her the appearance of being composed of several incongruous pieces which there was no individuality to bind together. The vertical fall of fringes, the curve of trimmings had made way for the inflexion of a body which made silk palpitate as a siren stirs the waves, gave to cambric a human expression now that it had been liberated, like a creature that had taken shape and drawn breath, from the long chaos and nebulous envelopment of fashions at length dethroned. But Mme. Swann had chosen, had contrived to preserve some vestiges of certain of these, in the very thick of the more recent fashions that had supplanted them. When in the evening, finding myself unable to work and feeling certain that Gilberte had gone to the theatre with friends, I paid a surprise visit to her parents, I used often to find Mme. Swann in an elegant dishabille the skirt of which, of one of those rich dark colours, blood-red or orange, which seemed always as though they meant something very special, because they were no longer the fashion, was crossed diagonally, though not concealed, by a broad band of black lace which recalled the flounces of an earlier day. When on a still chilly afternoon in Spring she had taken me (before my rupture with her daughter) to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, under her coat, which she opened or buttoned up according as the exercise made her feel warm, the dog-toothed border of her blouse suggested a glimpse of the lapel of some non-existent waistcoat such as she had been accustomed to wear, some years earlier, when she had liked their edges to have the same slight indentations; and her scarf--of that same "Scotch tartan" to which she had remained faithful, but whose tones she had so far softened, red becoming pink and blue lilac, that one might almost have taken it for one of those pigeon's-breast taffetas which were the latest novelty--was knotted in such a way under her chin, without one's being able to make out where it was fastened, that one could not help being reminded of those bonnet-strings which were now no longer worn. She need only "hold out" like this for a little longer and young men attempting to understand her theory of dress would say: "Mme. Swann is quite a period in herself, isn't she?" As in a fine literary style which overlays with its different forms and so strengthens a tradition which lies concealed among them, so in Mme. Swann's attire those half-hinted memories of waistcoats or of ringlets, sometimes a tendency, at once repressed, towards the "all aboard", or even a distant and vague allusion to the "chase me" kept alive beneath the concrete form the unfinished likeness of other, older forms which you would not have succeeded, now, in making a tailor or a dressmaker reproduce, but about which your thoughts incessantly hovered, and enwrapped Mme. Swann in a cloak of nobility--perhaps because the sheer uselessness of these fripperies made them seem meant to serve some more than utilitarian purpose, perhaps because of the traces they preserved of vanished years, or else because there was a sort of personality permeating this lady's wardrobe, which gave to the most dissimilar of her costumes a distinct family likeness. One felt that she did not dress simply for the comfort or the adornment of her body; she was surrounded by her garments as by the delicate and spiritualised machinery of a whole form of civilisation. When Gilberte, who, as a rule, gave her tea-parties on the days when her mother was "at home", had for some reason to go out, and I was therefore free to attend Mme. Swann's "kettledrum", I would find her dressed in one of her lovely gowns, some of which were of taffeta, others of grosgrain, or of velvet, or of _crêpe-de-Chine_, or satin or silk, gowns which, not being loose like those that she generally wore in the house but buttoned up tight as though she were just going out in them, gave to her stay-at-home laziness on those afternoons something alert and energetic. And no doubt the daring simplicity of their cut was singularly appropriate to her figure and to her movements, which her sleeves appeared to be symbolising in colours that varied from day to day: one would have said that there was a sudden determination in the blue velvet, an easy-going good-humour in the white taffeta, and that a sort of supreme discretion full of dignity in her way of holding out her arm had, in order to become visible, put on the appearance, dazzling with the smile of one who had made great sacrifices, of the black _crêpe-de-Chine._ But at the same time these animated gowns took from the complication of their trimmings, none of which had any practical value or served any conceivable purpose, something detached, pensive, secret, in harmony with the melancholy which Mme. Swann never failed to shew, at least in the shadows under her eyes and the drooping arches of her hands. Beneath the profusion of sapphire charms, enamelled four-leaf clovers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, ruby chains and topaz chestnuts there would be, on the dress itself, some design carried out in colour which pursued across the surface of an inserted panel a preconceived existence of its own, some row of little satin buttons, which buttoned nothing and could not be unbuttoned, a strip of braid that sought to please the eye with the minuteness, the discretion of a delicate reminder; and these, as well as the trinkets, had the effect--for otherwise there would have been no possible justification of their presence--of disclosing a secret intention, being a pledge of affection, keeping a secret, ministering to a superstition, commemorating a recovery from sickness, a granted wish, a love affair or a "philippine". And now and then in the blue velvet of the bodice a hint of "slashes", in the Henri II style, in the gown of black satin a slight swelling which, if it was in the sleeves, just below the shoulders, made one think of the "leg of mutton" sleeves of 1830, or if, on the other hand, it was beneath the skirt, with its Louis XV paniers, gave the dress a just perceptible air of being "fancy dress" and at all events, by insinuating beneath the life of the present day a vague reminiscence of the past, blended with the person of Mme. Swann the charm of certain heroines of history or romance. And if I were to draw her attention to this: "I don't play golf," she would answer, "like so many of my friends. So I should have no excuse for going about, as they do, in sweaters." In the confusion of her drawing-room, on her way from shewing out one visitor, or with a plateful of cakes to "tempt" another, Mme. Swann as she passed by me would take me aside for a moment: "I have special instructions from Gilberte that you are to come to luncheon the day after to-morrow. As I wasn't sure of seeing you here, I was going to write to you if you hadn't come." I continued to resist. And this resistance was costing me steadily less and less, because, however much one may love the poison that is destroying one, when one has compulsorily to do without it, and has had to do without it for some time past, one cannot help attaching a certain value to the peace of mind which one had ceased to know, to the absence of emotion and suffering. If one is not altogether sincere in assuring oneself that one does not wish ever to see again her whom one loves, one would not be a whit more sincere in saying that one would like to see her. For no doubt one can endure her absence only when one promises oneself that it shall not be for long, and thinks of the day on which one shall see her again, but at the same time one feels how much less painful are those daily recurring dreams of a meeting immediate and incessantly postponed than would be an interview which might be followed by a spasm of jealousy, with the result that the news that one is shortly to see her whom one loves would cause a disturbance which would be none too pleasant. What one procrastinates now from day to day is no longer the end of the intolerable anxiety caused by separation, it is the dreaded renewal of emotions which can lead to nothing. How infinitely one prefers to any such interview the docile memory which one can supplement at one's pleasure with dreams, in which she who in reality does not love one seems, far from that, to be making protestations of her love for one, when one is by oneself; that memory which one can contrive, by blending gradually with it a portion of what one desires, to render as pleasing as one may choose, how infinitely one prefers it to the avoided interview in which one would have to deal with a creature to whom one could no longer dictate at one's pleasure the words that one would like to hear on her lips, but from whom one would meet with fresh coldness, unlooked-for violence. We know, all of us, when we no longer love, that forgetfulness, that even a vague memory do not cause us so much suffering as an ill-starred love. It was of such forgetfulness that in anticipation I preferred, without acknowledging it to myself, the reposeful tranquillity. Moreover, whatever discomfort there may be in such a course of psychical detachment and isolation grows steadily less for another reason, namely that it weakens while it is in process of healing that fixed obsession which is a state of love. Mine was still strong enough for me to be able to count upon recapturing my old position in Gilberte's estimation, which in view of my deliberate abstention must, it seemed to me, be steadily increasing; in other words each of those calm and melancholy days on which I did not see her, coming one after the other without interruption, continuing too without prescription (unless some busy-body were to meddle in my affairs), was a day not lost but gained. Gained to no purpose, it might be, for presently they would be able to pronounce that I was healed. Resignation, modulating our habits, allows certain elements of our strength to be indefinitely increased. Those--so wretchedly inadequate--that I had had to support my grief, on the first evening of my rupture with Gilberte, had since multiplied to an incalculable power. Only, the tendency which everything that exists has to prolong its own existence is sometimes interrupted by sudden impulses to which we give way with all the fewer scruples over letting ourselves go since we know for how many days, for how many months even we have been able, and might still be able to abstain. And often it is when the purse in which we hoard our savings is nearly full that we undo and empty it, it is without waiting for the result of our medical treatment and when we have succeeded in growing accustomed to it that we abandon it. So, one day, when Mme. Swann was repeating her familiar statement of what a pleasure it would be to Gilberte to see me, thus putting the happiness of which I had now for so long been depriving myself, as it were within arm's length, I was stupefied by the realisation that it was still possible for me to enjoy that pleasure, and I could hardly wait until next day; when I had made up my mind to take Gilberte by surprise, in the evening, before dinner. What helped me to remain patient throughout the long day that followed was another plan that I had made. From the moment in which everything was forgotten, in which I was reconciled to Gilberte, I no longer wished to visit her save as a lover. Every day she should receive from me the finest flowers that grew. And if Mme. Swann, albeit she had no right to be too severe a mother, should forbid my making a daily offering of flowers, I should find other gifts, more precious and less frequent. My parents did not give me enough money for me to be able to buy expensive things. I thought of a big bowl of old Chinese porcelain which had been left to me by aunt Léonie, and of which Mamma prophesied daily that Françoise would come running to her with an "Oh, it's all come to pieces!" and that that would be the end of it. Would it not be wiser, in that case, to part with it, to sell it so as to be able to give Gilberte all the pleasure I could. I felt sure that I could easily get a thousand francs for it. I had it tied up in paper; I had grown so used to it that I had ceased altogether to notice it; parting with it had at least the advantage of making me realise what it was like. I took it with me as I started for the Swanns', and, giving the driver their address, told him to go by the Champs-Elysées, at one end of which was the shop of a big dealer in oriental things, who knew my father. Greatly to my surprise he offered me there and then not one thousand but ten thousand francs for the bowl. I took the notes with rapture. Every day, for a whole year, I could smother Gilberte in roses and lilac. When I left the shop and got into my cab again the driver (naturally enough, since the Swanns lived out by the Bois) instead of taking the ordinary way began to drive me along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. He had just passed the end of the Rue de Berri when, in the failing light, I thought I saw, close to the Swanns' house but going in the other direction, going away from it, Gilberte, who was walking slowly, though with a firm step, by the side of a young man with whom she was conversing, but whose face I could not distinguish. I stood up in the cab, meaning to tell the driver to stop; then hesitated. The strolling couple were already some way away, and the parallel lines which their leisurely progress was quietly drawing were on the verge of disappearing in the Elysian gloom. A moment later, I had reached Gilberte's door. I was received by Mme. Swann. "Oh! she will be sorry!" was my greeting, "I can't think why she isn't in. She came home just now from a lesson, complaining of the heat, and said she was going out for a little fresh air with another girl." "I fancy I passed her in the Avenue des Champs-Elysées." "Oh, I don't think it can have been. Anyhow, don't mention it to her father; he doesn't approve of her going out at this time of night. Must you go? Good-bye." I left her, told my driver to go home the same way, but found no trace of the two walking figures. Where had they been? What were they saying to one another in the darkness so confidentially? I returned home, desperately clutching my windfall of ten thousand francs, which would have enabled me to arrange so many pleasant surprises for that Gilberte whom now I had made up my mind never to see again. No doubt my call at the dealer's had brought me happiness by allowing me to expect that in future, whenever I saw my friend, she would be pleased with me and grateful. But if I had not called there, if my cabman had not taken the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, I should not have seen Gilberte with that young man. Thus a single action may have two contradictory effects, and the misfortune that it engenders cancel the good fortune that it has already brought one. There had befallen me the opposite of what so frequently happens. We desire some pleasure, and the material means of obtaining it are lacking. "It is a mistake," Labruyère tells us, "to be in love without an ample fortune." There is nothing for it but to attempt a gradual elimination of our desire for that pleasure. In my case, however, the material means had been forthcoming, but at the same moment, if not by a logical effect, at any rate as a fortuitous consequence of that initial success, my pleasure had been snatched from me. As, for that matter, it seems as though it must always be. As a rule, however, not on the same evening on which we have acquired what makes it possible. Usually, we continue to struggle and to hope for a little longer. But the pleasure can never be realised. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our heart until it desires something other than what it is going to obtain. And if this transposition has been so rapid that our heart has not had time to change, nature does not, on that account, despair of conquering us, in a manner more gradual, it is true, more subtle, but no less efficacious. It is then, at the last moment, that the possession of our happiness is wrested from us, or rather it is that very possession which nature, with diabolical cleverness, uses to destroy our happiness. After failure in every quarter of the domain of life and action, it is a final incapacity, the mental incapacity for happiness that nature creates in us. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives way to the bitterest of reactions. I put my ten thousand francs in a drawer. But they were no longer of any use to me. I ran through them, as it happened, even sooner than if I had sent flowers every day to Gilberte, for when evening came I was always too wretched to stay in the house and used to go and pour out my sorrows upon the bosoms of women whom I did not love. As for seeking to give any sort of pleasure to Gilberte, I no longer thought of that; to visit her house again now could only have added to my sufferings. Even the sight of Gilberte, which would have been so exquisite a pleasure only yesterday, would no longer have sufficed me. For I should have been miserable all the time that I was not actually with her. That is how a woman, by every fresh torture that she inflicts on us, increases, often quite unconsciously, her power over us and at the same time our demands upon her. With each injury that she does us, she encircles us more and more completely, doubles our chains--but halves the strength of those which hitherto we had thought adequate to bind her in order that we might retain our own peace of mind. Only yesterday, had I not been afraid of annoying Gilberte, I should have been content to ask for no more than occasional meetings, which now would no longer have contented me and for which I should now have substituted quite different terms. For in this respect love is not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle. This was not my position with regard to Gilberte. Also I preferred, at first, not to see her mother again. I continued, it is true, to assure myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known this for ever so long, that I could see her again if I chose, and, if I did not choose, forget her in course of time. But these ideas, like a remedy which has no effect upon certain complaints, had no power whatsoever to obliterate those two parallel lines which I kept on seeing, traced by Gilberte and the young man as they slowly disappeared along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. This was a fresh misfortune, which like the rest would gradually lose its force, a fresh image which would one day present itself to my mind's eye completely purged of every noxious element that it now contained, like those deadly poisons which one can handle without danger, or like a crumb of dynamite which one can use to light one's cigarette without fear of an explosion. Meanwhile there was in me another force which was striving with all its might to overpower that unwholesome force which still shewed me, without alteration, the figure of Gilberte walking in the dusk: to meet and to break the shock of the renewed assaults of memory, I had, toiling effectively on the other side, imagination. The former force did indeed continue to shew me that couple walking in the Champs-Elysées, and offered me other disagreeable pictures drawn from the past, as for instance Gilberte shrugging her shoulders when her mother asked her to stay and entertain me. But the other force, working upon the canvas of my hopes, outlined a future far more attractively developed than this poor past which, after all, was so restricted. For one minute in which I saw Gilberte's sullen face, how many were there in which I planned to my own satisfaction all the steps that she was to take towards our reconciliation, perhaps even towards our betrothal. It is true that this force, which my imagination was concentrating upon the future, it was drawing, for all that, from the past. I was still in love with her whom, it is true, I believed that I detested. But whenever anyone told me that I was looking well, or was nicely dressed, I wished that she could have been there to see me. I was irritated by the desire that many people shewed about this time to ask me to their houses, and refused all their invitations. There was a scene at home because I did not accompany my father to an official dinner at which the Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, a young girl still hardly more than a child. So it is that the different periods of our life overlap one another. We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place. Mine were steadily growing less. I had the surprise of discovering in my own heart one sentiment one day, another the next, generally inspired by some hope or some fear relative to Gilberte. To the Gilberte whom I kept within me. I ought to have reminded myself that the other, the real Gilberte was perhaps entirely different from mine, knew nothing of the regrets that I ascribed to her, was thinking probably less about me, not merely than I was thinking about her but than I made her be thinking about me when I was closeted alone with my fictitious Gilberte, wondering what really were her feelings with regard to me and so imagining her attention as constantly directed towards myself. During those periods in which our bitterness of spirit, though steadily diminishing, still persists, a distinction must be drawn between the bitterness which comes to us from our constantly thinking of the person herself and that which is revived by certain memories, some cutting speech, some word in a letter that we have had from her. The various forms which that bitterness can assume we shall examine when we come to deal with another and later love affair; for the present it must suffice to say that, of these two kinds, the former is infinitely the less cruel. That is because our conception of the person, since it dwells always within ourselves, is there adorned with the halo with which we are bound before long to invest her, and bears the marks if not of the frequent solace of hope, at any rate of the tranquillity of a permanent sorrow. (It must also be observed that the image of a person who makes us suffer counts for little if anything in those complications which aggravate the unhappiness of love, prolong it and prevent our recovery, just as in certain maladies the cause is insignificant beyond comparison with the fever which follows it and the time that must elapse before our convalescence.) But if the idea of the person whom we love catches and reflects a ray of light from a mind which is on the whole optimistic, it is not so with those special memories, those cutting words, that inimical letter (I received only one that could be so described from Gilberte); you would say that the person herself dwelt in those fragments, few and scattered as they were, and dwelt there multiplied to a power of which she falls ever so far short in the idea which we are accustomed to form of her as a whole. Because the letter has not--as the image of the beloved creature has--been contemplated by us in the melancholy calm of regret; we have read it, devoured it in the fearful anguish with which we were wrung by an unforeseen misfortune. Sorrows of this sort come to us in another way; from without; and it is along the road of the most cruel suffering that they have penetrated to our heart. The picture of our friend in our mind, which we believe to be old, original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by her many times over. The cruel memory is not itself contemporary with the restored picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in ourself, who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous age of gold, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled, those memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make us feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been borne from that reality by the baseless hopes engendered daily while we waited for something to happen. Not that the said reality is bound always to remain the same, though that does indeed happen at times. There are in our life any number of women whom we have never wished to see again, and who have quite naturally responded to our in no way calculated silence with a silence as profound. Only in their case as we never loved them, we have never counted the years spent apart from them, and this instance, which would invalidate our whole argument, we are inclined to forget when we are considering the healing effect of isolation, just as people who believe in presentiments forget all the occasions on which their own have not "come true". But, after a time, absence may prove efficacious. The desire, the appetite for seeing us again may after all be reborn in the heart which at present contemns us. Only, we must allow time. Now the demands which we ourselves make upon time are no less exorbitant than those of a heart in process of changing. For one thing, time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our own suffering is keen and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the interval of time which the other heart needs to effect its change our own heart will have spent in changing itself also, so that when the goal which we had ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to count as a goal, or to seem worth attaining. This idea, however, that it will be attainable, that what, when it no longer spells any good fortune to us, we shall ultimately secure is not good fortune, this idea embodies a part, but a part only of the truth. Our good fortune accrues to us when we have grown indifferent to it. But the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and allow us in retrospect to feel convinced that we should have been in raptures over our good fortune had it come at a time when, very probably, it would have seemed to us miserably inadequate. People are not very hard to satisfy nor are they very good judges of matters in which they take no interest. The friendly overtures of a person whom we no longer love, overtures which strike us, in our indifference to her, as excessive, would perhaps have fallen a long way short of satisfying our love. Those tender speeches, that invitation or acceptance, we think only of the pleasure which they would have given us, and not of all those other speeches and meetings by which we should have wished to see them immediately followed, which we should, as likely as not, simply by our avidity for them, have precluded from ever happening. So that we can never be certain that the good fortune which comes to us too late, when we are no longer in love, is altogether the same as that good fortune the want of which made us, at one time, so unhappy. There is only one person who could decide that; our ego of those days; he is no longer with us, and were he to reappear, no doubt that would be quite enough to make our good fortune--whether identical or not--vanish. Pending these posthumous fulfilments of a dream in which I should not, when the time came, be greatly interested, by dint of my having to invent, as in the days when I still hardly knew Gilberte, speeches, letters in which she implored my forgiveness, swore that she had never loved anyone but myself and besought me to marry her, a series of pleasant images incessantly renewed came by degrees to hold a larger place in my mind than the vision of Gilberte and the young man, which had nothing now to feed upon. At this point I should perhaps have resumed my visits to Mme. Swann but for a dream that came to me, in which one of my friends, who was not, however, one that I could identify, behaved with the utmost treachery towards me and appeared to believe that I had been treacherous to him. Abruptly awakened by the pain which this dream had given me, and finding that it persisted after I was awake, I turned my thoughts back to the dream, racked my brains to discover who could have been the friend whom I had seen in my sleep, the sound of whose name--a Spanish name--was no longer distinct in my ears. Combining Joseph's part with Pharaoh's, I set to work to interpret my dream. I knew that, when one is interpreting a dream, it is often a mistake to pay too much attention to the appearance of the people one saw in it, who may perhaps have been disguised or have exchanged faces, like those mutilated saints on the walls of cathedrals which ignorant archaeologists have restored, fitting the body of one to the head of another and confusing all their attributes and names. Those that people bear in a dream are apt to mislead us. The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer. From mine I learned that, though transformed while I was asleep into a young man, the person whose recent betrayal still hurt me was Gilberte. I remembered then that, the last time I had seen her, on the day when her mother had forbidden her to go out to a dancing lesson, she had, whether in sincerity or in make-believe, declined, laughing in a strange manner, to believe in the genuineness of my feeling for her. And by association this memory brought back to me another. Long before that, it had been Swann who would not believe in my sincerity, nor that I was a suitable friend for Gilberte. In vain had I written to him, Gilberte had brought back my letter and had returned it to me with the same incomprehensible laugh. She had not returned it to me at once: I remembered now the whole of that scene behind the clump of laurels. As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral. Gilberte's recent antipathy for me seemed to me a judgment delivered on me by life for my conduct that afternoon. Such judgments one imagines one can escape because one looks out for carriages when one is crossing the street, and avoids obvious dangers. But there are others that take effect within us. The accident comes from the side to which one has not been looking, from inside, from the heart. Gilberte's words: "If you like, we might go on wrestling," made me shudder. I imagined her behaving like that, at home perhaps, in the linen-room, with the young man whom I had seen escorting her along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. And so, just as when, a little time back, I had believed myself to be calmly established in a state of happiness, it had been fatuous in me, now that I had abandoned all thought of happiness, to take for granted that at least I had grown and was going to remain calm. For, so long as our heart keeps enshrined with any permanence the image of another person, it is not only our happiness that may at any moment be destroyed; when that happiness has vanished, when we have suffered, and, later, when we have succeeded in lulling our sufferings to sleep, the thing then that is as elusive, as precarious as ever our happiness was is our calm. Mine returned to me in the end, for the cloud which, lowering our resistance, tempering our desires, has penetrated, in the train of a dream, the enclosure of our mind, is bound, in course of time, to dissolve, permanence and stability being assured to nothing in this world, not even to grief. Besides, those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. As consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause of their grief, and as their grief is an emanation from that person, it is there, in their grief itself, that they must in the end find a remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for the longer they turn it over in their minds this grief will continue to shew them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted creature, at one moment so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire to see her, since before finding enjoyment in her company one would have first to make her suffer, at another so pleasant that the pleasantness in which one has invested her one adds to her own stock of good qualities and finds in it a fresh reason for hope. But even although the anguish that had reawakened in me did at length grow calm, I no longer wished--except just occasionally--to visit Mme. Swann. In the first place because, among those who love and have been forsaken, the state of incessant--even if unconfessed--expectancy in which they live undergoes a spontaneous transformation, and, while to all appearance unchanged, substitutes for its original elements others that are precisely the opposite. The first were the consequences of--a reaction from the painful incidents which had upset us. The tension of waiting for what is yet to come is mingled with fear, all the more since we desire at such moments, should no message come to us from her whom we love, to act for ourselves, and are none too confident of the success of a step which, once we have taken it, we may find it impossible to follow up. But presently, without our having noticed any change, this tension, which still endures, is sustained, we discover, no longer by our recollection of the past but by anticipation of an imaginary future. From that moment it is almost pleasant. Besides, the first state, by continuing for some time, has accustomed us to living in expectation. The suffering that we felt during those last meetings survives in us still, but is already lulled to sleep. We are in no haste to arouse it, especially as we do not see very clearly what to ask for now. The possession of a little more of the woman whom we love would only make more essential to us the part that we did not yet possess, which is bound to remain, whatever happens, since our requirements are begotten of our satisfactions, an irreducible quantity. Another, final reason came later on to reinforce this, and to make me discontinue altogether my visits to Mme. Swann. This reason, slow in revealing itself, was not that I had now forgotten Gilberte but that I must make every effort to forget her as speedily as possible. No doubt, now that the keen edge of my suffering was dulled, my visits to Mme. Swann had become once again, for what sorrow remained in me, the sedative and distraction which had been so precious to me at first. But what made the sedative efficacious made the distraction impossible, namely that with these visits the memory of Gilberte was intimately blended. The distraction would be of no avail to me unless it was employed to combat a sentiment which the presence of Gilberte no longer nourished, thoughts, interests, passions in which Gilberte should have no part. These states of consciousness, to which the person whom we love remains a stranger, then occupy a place which, however small it may be at first, is always so much reconquered from the love that has been in unchallenged possession of our whole soul. We must seek to encourage these thoughts, to make them grow, while the sentiment which is no more now than a memory dwindles, so that the new elements introduced into our mind contest with that sentiment, wrest from it an ever increasing part of our soul, until at last the victory is complete. I decided that this was the only way in which my love could be killed, and I was still young enough, still courageous enough to undertake the attempt, to subject myself to that most cruel grief which springs from the certainty that, whatever time one may devote to the effort, it will prove successful in the end. The reason I now gave in my letters to Gilberte for refusing to see her was an allusion to some mysterious misunderstanding, wholly fictitious, which was supposed to have arisen between her and myself, and as to which I had hoped at first that Gilberte would insist upon my furnishing her with an explanation. But, as a matter of fact, never, even in the most insignificant relations in life, does a request for enlightenment come from a correspondent who knows that an obscure, untruthful, incriminating sentence has been written on purpose, so that he shall protest against it, and is only too glad to feel, when he reads it, that he possesses--and to keep in his own hands--the initiative in the coming operations. For all the more reason is this so in our more tender relations, in which love is endowed with so much eloquence, indifference with so little curiosity. Gilberte having never appeared to doubt nor sought to learn more about this misunderstanding, it became for me a real entity, to which I referred anew in every letter. And there is in these baseless situations, in the affectation of coldness a sort of fascination which tempts one to persevere in them. By dint of writing: "Now that our hearts are sundered," so that Gilberte might answer: "But they are not. Do explain what you mean," I had gradually come to believe that they were. By constantly repeating, "Life may have changed for us, it will never destroy the feeling that we had for one another," in the hope of hearing myself, one day, say: "But there has been no change, the feeling is stronger now than ever it was," I was living with the idea that life had indeed changed, that we should keep only the memory of a feeling which no longer existed, as certain neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by becoming chronic invalids. Now, whenever I had to write to Gilberte, I brought my mind back to this imagined change, which, being now tacitly admitted by the silence which she preserved with regard to it in her replies, would in future subsist between us. Then Gilberte ceased to make a point of ignoring it. She too adopted my point of view; and, as in the speeches at official banquets, when the foreign Sovereign who is being entertained adopts practically the same expressions as have just been used by the Sovereign who is entertaining him, whenever I wrote to Gilberte: "Life may have parted us; the memory of the days when we knew one another will endure," she never failed to respond: "Life may have parted us; it cannot make us forget those happy hours which will always be dear to us both," (though we should have found it hard to say why or how "Life" had parted us, or what change had occurred). My sufferings were no longer excessive. And yet, one day when I was telling her in a letter that I had heard of the death of our old barley-sugar woman in the Champs-Elysées, as I wrote the words: "I felt at once that this would distress you, in me it awakened a host of memories," I could not restrain myself from bursting into tears when I saw that I was speaking in the past tense, as though it were of some dead friend, now almost forgotten, of this love of which in spite of myself I had never ceased to think as of a thing still alive, or one that at least might be born again. Nothing can be more affectionate than this sort of correspondence between friends who do not wish to see one another any more. Gilberte's letters to me had all the delicate refinement of those which I used to write to people who did not matter, and shewed me the same apparent marks of affection, which it was so pleasant for me to receive from her. But, as time went on, every refusal to see her disturbed me less. And as she became less dear to me, my painful memories were no longer strong enough to destroy by their incessant return the growing pleasure which I found in thinking of Florence, or of Venice. I regretted, at such moments, that I had abandoned the idea of diplomacy and had condemned myself to a sedentary existence, in order not to be separated from a girl whom I should not see again and had already almost forgotten. We construct our house of life to suit another person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, a prisoner within the walls which were intended only for her. If Venice seemed to my parents to be a long way off, and its climate treacherous, it was at least quite easy for me to go, without tiring myself, and settle down at Balbec. But to do that I should have had to leave Paris, to forego those visits thanks to which, infrequent as they were, I might sometimes hear Mme. Swann telling me about her daughter. Besides, I was beginning to find in them various pleasures in which Gilberte had no part. When spring drew round, and with it the cold weather, during an icy Lent and the hailstorms of Holy Week, as Mme. Swann began to find it cold in the house, I used often to see her entertaining her guests in her furs, her shivering hands and shoulders hidden beneath the gleaming white carpet of an immense rectangular muff and a cape, both of ermine, which she had not taken off on coming in from her drive, and which suggested the last patches of the snows of winter, more persistent than the rest, which neither the heat of the fire nor the advancing season had succeeded in melting. And the whole truth about these glacial but already flowering weeks was suggested to me in this drawing-room, which soon I should be entering no more, by other more intoxicating forms of whiteness, that for example of the guelder-roses clustering, at the summits of their tall bare stalks, like the rectilinear trees in pre-raphaelite paintings, their balls of blossom, divided yet composite, white as annunciating angels and breathing a fragrance as of lemons. For the mistress of Tansonville knew that April, even an ice-bound April was not barren of flowers, that winter, spring, summer are not held apart by barriers as hermetic as might be supposed by the town-dweller who, until the first hot day, imagines the world as containing nothing but houses that stand naked in the rain. That Mme. Swann was content with the consignments furnished by her Combray gardener, that she did not, by the intervention of her own "special" florist, fill up the gaps left by an insufficiently powerful magic with subsidies borrowed from a precocious Mediterranean shore, I do not for a moment suggest, nor did it worry me at the time. It was enough to fill me with longing for country scenes that, overhanging the loose snowdrifts of the muff in which Mme. Swann kept her hands, the guelder-rose snow-balls (which served very possibly in the mind of my hostess no other purpose than to compose, on the advice of Bergotte, a 'Symphony in White' with her furniture and her garments) reminded me that what the Good Friday music in _Parsifal_ symbolised was a natural miracle which one could see performed every year, if one had the sense to look for it, and, assisted by the acid and heady perfume of the other kinds of blossom, which, although their names were unknown to me, had brought me so often to a standstill to gaze at them on my walks round Combray, made Mme. Swann's drawing-room as virginal, as candidly "in bloom", without the least vestige of greenery, as overladen with genuine scents of flowers as was the little lane by Tansonville. But it was still more than I could endure that these memories should be recalled to me. There was a risk of their reviving what little remained of my love for Gilberte. Besides, albeit I no longer felt the least distress during these visits to Mme. Swann, I extended the intervals between them and endeavoured to see as little of her as possible. At most, since I continued not to go out of Paris, I allowed myself an occasional walk with her. Fine weather had come at last, and the sun was hot. As I knew that before luncheon Mme. Swann used to go out every day for an hour, and would stroll for a little in the Avenue du Bois, near the Etoile--a spot which, at that time, because of the people who used to collect there to gaze at the "swells" whom they knew only by name, was known as the "Shabby-Genteel Club"--I persuaded my parents, on Sundays, (for on weekdays I was busy all morning), to let me postpone my luncheon until long after theirs, until a quarter past one, and go for a walk before it. During May, that year, I never missed a Sunday, for Gilberte had gone to stay with friends in the country. I used to reach the Arc-de-Triomphe about noon. I kept watch at the entrance to the Avenue, never taking my eyes off the corner of the side-street along which Mme. Swann, who had only a few yards to walk, would come from her house. As by this time many of the people who had been strolling there were going home to luncheon, those who remained were few in number and, for the most part, fashionably dressed. Suddenly, on the gravelled path, unhurrying, cool, luxuriant, Mme. Swann appeared, displaying around her a toilet which was never twice the same, but which I remember as being typically mauve; then she hoisted and unfurled at the end of its long stalk, just at the moment when her radiance was most complete, the silken banner of a wide parasol of a shade that matched the showering petals of her gown. A whole troop of people escorted her; Swann himself, four or five fellows from the Club, who had been to call upon her that morning or whom she had met in the street: and their black or grey agglomeration, obedient to her every gesture, performing the almost mechanical movements of a lifeless setting in which Odette was framed, gave to this woman, in whose eyes alone was there any intensity, the air of looking out in front of her, from among all those men, as from a window behind which she had taken her stand, and made her emerge there, frail but fearless, in the nudity of her delicate colours, like the apparition of a creature of a different species, of an unknown race, and of almost martial strength, by virtue of which she seemed by herself a match for all her multiple escort. Smiling, rejoicing in the fine weather, in the sunshine which had not yet become trying, with the air of calm assurance of a creator who has accomplished his task and takes no thought for anything besides; certain that her clothes--even though the vulgar herd should fail to appreciate them--were the smartest anywhere to be seen, she wore them for herself and for her friends, naturally, without exaggerated attention to them but also without absolute detachment; not preventing the little bows of ribbon upon her bodice and skirt from floating buoyantly upon the air before her, like separate creatures of whose presence there she was not unconscious, but was indulgent enough to let them play if they chose, keeping their own rhythm, provided that they accompanied her where she led the way; and even upon her mauve parasol, which, as often as not, she had not yet "put up" when she appeared on the scene, she let fall now and then, as though upon a bunch of Parma violets, a gaze happy and so kindly that, when it was fastened no longer upon her friends but on some inanimate object, her eyes still seemed to smile. She thus kept open, she made her garments occupy that interval of smartness, of which the men with whom she was on the most familiar terms respected both the existence and its necessity, not without shewing a certain deference, as of profane visitors to a shrine, an admission of their own ignorance, an interval over which they recognised that their friend had (as we recognise that a sick man has over the special precautions that he has to take, or a mother over her children's education) a competent jurisdiction. No less than by the court which encircled her and seemed not to observe the passers-by, Mme. Swann by the lateness of her appearance there at once suggested those rooms in which she had spent so long, so leisurely a morning and to which she must presently return for luncheon; she seemed to indicate their proximity by the unhurrying ease of her progress, like the turn that one takes up and down one's own garden of those rooms one would have said that she was carrying about her still the cool, the indoor shade. But for that very reason the sight of her gave me only a stronger sensation of open air and warmth. All the more because, being assured in my own mind that, in accordance with the liturgy, with the ritual in which Mme. Swann was so profoundly versed, her clothes were connected with the time of year and of day by a bond both inevitable and unique, I felt that the flowers upon the stiff straw brim of her hat, the baby-ribbons upon her dress had been even more naturally born of the month of May than the flowers in gardens and in woods; and to learn what latest change there was in weather or season I had not to raise my eyes higher than to her parasol, open and outstretched like another, a nearer sky, round, clement, mobile, blue. For these rites, if they were of sovereign importance, subjugated their glory (and, consequently, Mme. Swann her own) in condescending obedience to the day, the spring, the sun, none of which struck me as being sufficiently flattered that so elegant a woman had been graciously pleased not to ignore their existence, and had chosen on their account a gown of a brighter, of a thinner fabric, suggesting to me, by the opening of its collar and sleeves, the moist warmness of the throat and wrists that they exposed,--in a word, had taken for them all the pains that a great personage takes who, having gaily condescended to pay a visit to common folk in the country, whom everyone, even the most plebeian, knows, yet makes a point of donning, for the occasion, suitable attire. On her arrival I would greet Mme. Swann, she stop me and say (in English) "Good morning," and smile. We would walk a little way together. And I learned then that these canons according to which she dressed, it was for her own satisfaction that she obeyed them, as though yielding to a Superior Wisdom of which she herself was High Priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep buttoned up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining there unperceived, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer has devoted infinite labour albeit they may never reach the ears of the public: or in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, I would drink in slowly, for my own pleasure or from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strip, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as delicately fashioned as the outer parts, like those gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as are the bas-reliefs over the main porch, and yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open air, sweeping the whole town with a comprehensive gaze, between the soaring towers. What enhanced this impression that Mme. Swann was walking in the Avenue as though along the paths of her own garden, was--for people ignorant of her habit of "taking exercise"--that she had come there on foot, without any carriage following, she whom, once May had begun, they were accustomed to see, behind the most brilliant "turn-out", the smartest liveries in Paris, gently and majestically seated, like a goddess, in the balmy air of an immense victoria on eight springs. On foot Mme. Swann had the appearance--especially as her pace began to slacken in the heat of the sun--of having yielded to curiosity, of committing an "exclusive" breach of all the rules of her code, like those Crowned Heads who, without consulting anyone, accompanied by the slightly scandalised admiration of a suite which dares not venture any criticism, step out of their boxes during a gala performance and visit the lobby of the theatre, mingling for a moment or two with the rest of the audience. So between Mme. Swann and themselves the crowd felt that there existed those barriers of a certain kind of opulence which seem to them the most insurmountable that there are. The Faubourg Saint-Germain may have its barriers also, but these are less "telling" to the eyes and imagination of the "shabby-genteel". These latter, when in the presence of a real personage, more simple, more easily mistaken for the wife of a small professional or business man, less remote from the people, will not feel the same sense of their own inequality, almost of their unworthiness, as dismays them when they encounter Mme. Swann. Of course women of that sort are not themselves dazzled, as the crowd are, by the brilliance of their apparel, they have ceased to pay any attention to it, but only because they have grown used to it, that is to say have come to look upon it more and more as natural and necessary, to judge their fellow creatures according as they are more or less initiated into these luxurious ways: so that (the grandeur which they allow themselves to display or discover in others being wholly material, easily verified, slowly acquired, the lack of it hard to compensate) if such women place a passer-by in the lowest rank of society, it is by the same instinctive process that has made them appear to him as in the highest, that is to say instinctively, at first sight, and without possibility of appeal. Perhaps that special class of society which included in those days women like Lady Israels, who mixed with the women of the aristocracy, and Mme. Swann, who was to get to know them later on, that intermediate class, inferior to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, since it "ran after" the denizens of that quarter, but superior to everything that was not of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, possessing this peculiarity that, while already detached from the world of the merely rich, it was riches still that it represented, but riches that had been canalised, serving a purpose, swayed by an idea that were artistic, malleable gold, chased with a poetic design, taught to smile; perhaps that class--in the same form, at least, and with the same charm--exists no longer. In any event, the women who were its members would not satisfy to-day what was the primary condition on which they reigned, since with advancing age they have lost--almost all of them--their beauty. Whereas it was (just as much as from the pinnacle of her noble fortune) from the glorious zenith of her ripe and still so fragrant summer that Mme. Swann, majestic, smiling, kind, as she advanced along the Avenue du Bois, saw like Hypatia, beneath the slow tread of her feet, worlds revolving. Various young men as they passed looked at her anxiously, not knowing whether their vague acquaintance with her (especially since, having been introduced only once, at the most, to Swann, they were afraid that he might not remember them) was sufficient excuse for their venturing to take off their hats. And they trembled to think of the consequences as they made up their minds, asking themselves whether the gesture, so bold, so sacrilegious a tempting of providence, would not let loose the catastrophic forces of nature or bring down upon them the vengeance of a jealous god. It provoked only, like the winding of a piece of clockwork, a series of gesticulations from little, responsive bowing figures, who were none other than Odette's escort, beginning with Swann himself, who raised his tall hat lined in green leather with an exquisite courtesy, which he had acquired in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but to which was no longer wedded the indifference that he would at one time have shewn. Its place was now taken (as though he had been to some extent permeated by Odette's prejudices) at once by irritation at having to acknowledge the salute of a person who was none too well dressed and by satisfaction at his wife's knowing so many people, a mixed sensation to which he gave expression by saying to the smart friends who walked by his side: "What! another! Upon my word, I can't imagine where my wife picks all these fellows up!" Meanwhile, having greeted with a slight movement of her head the terrified youth, who had already passed out of sight though his heart was still beating furiously, Mme. Swann turned to me: "Then it's all over?" she put it to me, "You aren't ever coming to see Gilberte again? I'm glad you make an exception of me, and are not going to 'drop' me straight away. I like seeing you, but I used to like also the influence you had over my daughter. I'm sure she's very sorry about it, too. However, I mustn't bully you, or you'll make up your mind at once that you never want to set eyes on me again." "Odette, Sagan's trying to speak to you!" Swann called his wife's attention. And there, indeed, was the Prince, as in some transformation scene at the close of a play, or in a circus, or an old painting, wheeling his horse round so as to face her, in a magnificent heroic pose, and doffing his hat with a sweeping theatrical and, so to speak, allegorical flourish in which he displayed all the chivalrous courtesy of a great noble bowing in token of his respect for Woman, were she incarnate in a woman whom it was impossible for his mother or his sister to know. And at every moment, recognised in the depths of the liquid transparency and of the luminous glaze of the shadow which her parasol cast over her, Mme. Swann was receiving the salutations of the last belated horsemen, who passed as though in a cinematograph taken as they galloped in the blinding glare of the Avenue, men from the clubs, whose names of whom, which meant only celebrities to the public, Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency and the rest--were for Mme. Swann the familiar names of friends. And as the average span of life, the relative longevity of our memories of poetical sensations is much greater than that of our memories of what the heart has suffered, long after the sorrows that I once felt on Gilberte's account have faded and vanished, there has survived them the pleasure that I still derive--whenever I close my eyes and read, as it were upon the face of a sundial, the minutes that are recorded between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock in the month of May--from seeing myself once again strolling and talking thus with Mme. Swann beneath her parasol, as though in the coloured shade of a wistaria bower. _PLACE-NAMES: THE PLACE_ I had arrived at a state almost of complete indifference to Gilberte when, two years later, I went with my grandmother to Balbec. When I succumbed to the attraction of a strange face, when it was with the help of some other girl that I hoped to discover gothic cathedrals, the palaces and gardens of Italy, I said to myself sadly that this love of ours, in so far as it is love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since if the association of pleasant or unpleasant trains of thought can attach it for a time to a woman so as to make us believe that it has been inspired by her, in a necessary sequence of effect to cause, yet when we detach ourselves, deliberately or unconsciously, from those associations, this love, as though it were indeed a spontaneous thing and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman. At the time, however, of my departure for Balbec, and during the earlier part of my stay there, my indifference was still only intermittent. Often, our life being so careless of chronology, interpolating so many anachronisms in the sequence of our days, I lived still among those--far older days than yesterday or last week--in which I loved Gilberte. And at once not seeing her became as exquisite a torture to me as it had been then. The self that had loved her, which another self had already almost entirely supplanted, rose again in me, stimulated far more often by a trivial than by an important event. For instance, if I may anticipate for a moment my arrival in Normandy, I heard some one who passed me on the sea-front at Balbec refer to the "Secretary to the Ministry of Posts and his family". Now, seeing that as yet I knew nothing of the influence which that family was to exercise over my life, this remark ought to have passed unheeded; instead, it gave me at once an acute twinge, which a self that had for the most part long since been outgrown in me felt at being parted from Gilberte. Because I had never given another thought to a conversation which Gilberte had had with her father in my hearing, in which allusion was made to the Secretary to the Ministry of Posts and his family. Now our love memories present no exception to the general rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general rules of Habit. And as Habit weakens every impression, what a person recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourself, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourself, did I say; rather within ourself, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourself face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer ourself but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. In the broad daylight of our ordinary memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never find them again. Or rather we should never find them again had not a few words (such as this "Secretary to the Ministry of Posts") been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable. But this suffering and this recrudescence of my love for Gilberte lasted no longer than such things last in a dream, and this time, on the contrary, because at Balbec the old Habit was no longer there to keep them alive. And if these two effects of Habit appear to be incompatible, that is because Habit is bound by a diversity of laws. In Paris I had grown more and more indifferent to Gilberte, thanks to Habit. The change of habit, that is to say the temporary cessation of Habit, completed Habit's task when I started for Balbec. It weakens, but it stabilises; it leads to disintegration but it makes the scattered elements last indefinitely. Day after day, for years past, I had begun by modelling my state of mind, more or less effectively, upon that of the day before. At Balbec, a strange bed, to the side of which a tray was brought in the morning that differed from my Paris breakfast tray, could not, obviously, sustain the fancies upon which my love for Gilberte had fed: there are cases (though not, I admit, commonly) in which, one's days being paralysed by a sedentary life, the best way to save time is to change one's place of residence. My journey to Balbec was like the first outing of a convalescent who needed only that to convince him that he was cured. The journey was one that would now be made, probably, in a motor-car, which would be supposed to render it more interesting. We shall see too that, accomplished in such a way, it would even be in a sense more genuine, since one would be following more nearly, in a closer intimacy, the various contours by which the surface of the earth is wrinkled. But after all the special attraction of the journey lies not in our being able to alight at places on the way and to stop altogether as soon as we grow tired, but in its making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality, intact, as it existed in our mind when imagination bore us from the place in which we were living right to the very heart of a place we longed to see, in a single sweep which seemed miraculous to us not so much because it covered a certain distance as because it united two distinct individualities of the world, took us from one name to another name; and this difference is accentuated (more than in a form of locomotion in which, since one can stop and alight where one chooses, there can scarcely be said to be any point of arrival) by the mysterious operation that is performed in those peculiar places, railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just as upon their sign-boards they bear its painted name. But in this respect as in every other, our age is infected with a mania for shewing things only in the environment that properly belongs to them, thereby suppressing the essential thing, the act of the mind which isolated them from that environment. A picture is nowadays "presented" in the midst of furniture, ornaments, hangings of the same period, a second-hand scheme of decoration in the composition of which in the houses of to-day excels that same hostess who but yesterday was so crassly ignorant, but now spends her time poring over records and in libraries; and among these the masterpiece at which we glance up from the table while we dine does not give us that exhilarating delight which we can expect from it only in a public gallery, which symbolises far better by its bareness, by the absence of all irritating detail, those innermost spaces into which the artist withdrew to create it. Unhappily those marvellous places which are railway stations, from which one sets out for a remote destination, are tragic places also, for if in them the miracle is accomplished whereby scenes which hitherto have had no existence save in our minds are to become the scenes among which we shall be living, for that very reason we must, as we emerge from the waiting-room, abandon any thought of finding ourself once again within the familiar walls which, but a moment ago, were still enclosing us. We must lay aside all hope of going home to sleep in our own bed, once we have made up our mind to penetrate into the pestiferous cavern through which we may have access to the mystery, into one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare into which I must go to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of the city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menaces, like certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross. So long as I had been content to look out from the warmth of my own bed in Paris at the Persian church of Balbec, shrouded in driving sleet, no sort of objection to this journey had been offered by my body. Its objections began only when it had gathered that it would have itself to take part in the journey, and that on the evening of my arrival I should be shewn to "my" room which to my body would be unknown. Its revolt was all the more deep-rooted in that on the very eve of my departure I learned that my mother would not be coming with us, my father, who would be kept busy at the Ministry until it was time for him to start for Spain with M. de Norpois, having preferred to take a house in the neighbourhood of Paris. On the other hand, the spectacle of Balbec seemed to me none the less desirable because I must purchase it at the price of a discomfort which, on the contrary, I felt to indicate and to guarantee the reality of the impression which I was going there to seek, an impression the place of which no spectacle of professedly equal value, no "panorama" which I might have gone to see without being thereby precluded from returning home to sleep in my own bed, could possibly have filled. It was not for the first time that I felt that those who love and those who find pleasure are not always the same. I believed myself to be longing fully as much for Balbec as the doctor who was treating me, when he said to me, surprised, on the morning of our departure, to see me look so unhappy; "I don't mind telling you that if I could only manage a week to go down and get a blow by the sea, I shouldn't wait to be asked twice. You'll be having races, regattas; you don't know what all!" But I had already learned the lesson--long before I was taken to hear Berma--that, whatever it might be that I loved, it would never be attained save at the end of a long and heart-rending pursuit, in the course of which I should have first to sacrifice my own pleasure to that paramount good instead of seeking it there. My grandmother, naturally enough, looked upon our exodus from a somewhat different point of view, and (for she was still as anxious as ever that the presents which were made me should take some artistic form) had planned, so that she might be offering me, of this journey, a "print" that was, at least, in parts "old", that we should repeat, partly by rail and partly by road, the itinerary that Mme. de Sévigné followed when she went from Paris to "L'Orient" by way of Chaulnes and "the Pont-Audemer". But my grandmother had been obliged to abandon this project, at the instance of my father who knew, whenever she organised any expedition with a view to extracting from it the utmost intellectual benefit that it was capable of yielding, what a tale there would be to tell of missed trains, lost luggage, sore throats and broken rules. She was free at least to rejoice in the thought that never, when the time came for us to sally forth to the beach, should we be exposed to the risk of being kept indoors by the sudden appearance of what her beloved Sévigné calls a "beast of a coachload", since we should know not a soul at Balbec, Legrandin having refrained from offering us a letter of introduction to his sister. (This abstention had not been so well appreciated by my aunts Céline and Flora, who, having known as a child that lady, of whom they had always spoken until then, to commemorate this early intimacy, as "Renée de Cambremer", and having had from her and still possessing a number of those little presents which continue to ornament a room or a conversation but to which the feeling between the parties no longer corresponds, imagined that they were avenging the insult offered to us by never uttering again, when they called upon Mme. Legrandin, the name of her daughter, confining themselves to a mutual congratulation, once they were safely out of the house: "I made no reference to you know whom!" "I think that went home!") And so we were simply to leave Paris by that one twenty-two train which I had too often beguiled myself by looking out in the railway time-table, where its itinerary never failed to give me the emotion, almost the illusion of starting by it, not to feel that I already knew it. As the delineation in our mind of the features of any form of happiness depends more on the nature of the longings that it inspires in us than the accuracy of the information which we have about it, I felt that I knew this train in all its details, nor did I doubt that I should feel, sitting in one of its compartments, a special delight as the day began to cool, should be contemplating this or that view as the train approached one or another station; so much so that this train, which always brought to my mind's eye the images of the same towns, which I bathed in the sunlight of those post-meridian hours through which it sped, seemed to me to be different from every other train; and I had ended--as we are apt to do with a person whom we have never seen but of whom we like to believe that we have won his friendship--by giving a distinct and unalterable cast of countenance to the traveller, artistic, golden-haired, who would thus have taken me with him upon his journey, and to whom I should bid farewell beneath the Cathedral of Saint-Lô, before he hastened to overtake the setting sun. As my grandmother could not bring herself to do anything so "stupid" as to go straight to Balbec, she was to break the journey half-way, staying the night with one of her friends, from whose house I was to proceed the same evening, so as not to be in the way there and also in order that I might arrive by daylight and see Balbec church, which, we had learned, was at some distance from Balbec-Plage, so that I might not have a chance to visit it later on, when I had begun my course of baths. And perhaps it was less painful for me to feel that the desirable goal of my journey stood between me and that cruel first night on which I should have to enter a new habitation, and consent to dwell there. But I had had first to leave the old; my mother had arranged to "move in", that afternoon, at Saint-Cloud, and had made, or pretended to make all the arrangements for going there directly after she had seen us off at the station, without needing to call again at our own house to which she was afraid that I might otherwise feel impelled at the last moment, instead of going to Balbec, to return with her. In fact, on the pretext of having so much to see to in the house which she had just taken and of being pressed for time, but in reality so as to spare me the cruel ordeal of a long-drawn parting, she had decided not to wait with us until that moment of the signal to start at which, concealed hitherto among ineffective comings and goings and preparations that lead to nothing definite, separation is made suddenly manifest, impossible to endure when it is no longer possibly to be avoided, concentrated in its entirety in one enormous instant of impotent and supreme lucidity. For the first time I began to feel that it was possible that my mother might live without me, otherwise than for me, a separate life. She was going to stay with my father, whose existence it may have seemed to her that my feeble health, my nervous excitability complicated somewhat and saddened. This separation made me all the more wretched because I told myself that it probably marked for my mother an end of the successive disappointments which I had caused her, of which she had never said a word to me but which had made her realise the difficulty of our taking our holidays together; and perhaps also the first trial of a form of existence to which she was beginning, now, to resign herself for the future, as the years crept on for my father and herself, an existence in which I should see less of her, in which (a thing that not even in my nightmares had yet been revealed to me) she would already have become something of a stranger, a lady who might be seen going home by herself to a house in which I should not be, asking the porter whether there was not a letter for her from me. I could