Ah, Yes

For a few days it bothered me re: why does this line from The Ponder Heart hit so close to home?  But now I realize it's because I've heard a better, funnier version of it, á la Swann's Way:

Our ’guests’ were practically limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who had put it out of action by coming in ’without ringing,’ but the double peal–timid, oval, gilded–of the visitors’ bell, everyone would at once exclaim “A visitor! Who in the world can it be?” but they knew quite well that it could only be M. Swann.