Proust on a rainy day

When I was a child, we called it "a good staying-inside day." Draw, color, have a snack, watch Lassie. Now there's reading Proust:

"Poor Swann," said Mme. des Laumes that night to her husband, "he's always kind, but he appears quite unhappy. You'll see, because he has promised to come to dinner one of these days. I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn't even interesting — because they say she's an idiot," she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 356

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