Page 306 - swanns-way

ny that is, when I go about seeking nothing else, and would
give my soul just to find a little love somewhere!’ she had
said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he
had been genuinely touched. ‘Some woman must have made
you suffer. And you think that the rest are all like her. She
can’t have understood you: you are so utterly different from
ordinary men. That’s what I liked about you when I first saw
you; I felt at once that you weren’t like everybody else.’
‘And then, besides, there’s yourself——‘ he had contin-
ued, ‘I know what women are; you must have a whole heap
of things to do, and never any time to spare.’
‘I? Why, I have never anything to do. I am always free,
and I always will be free if you want me. At whatever hour
of the day or night it may suit you to see me, just send for
me, and I shall be only too delighted to come. Will you do
that? Do you know what I should really like—to introduce
you to Mme. Verdurin, where I go every evening. Just fancy
my finding you there, and thinking that it was a little for my
sake that you had gone.’
No doubt, in thus remembering their conversations,
in thinking about her thus when he was alone, he did no
more than call her image into being among those of count-
less other women in his romantic dreams; but if, thanks to
some accidental circumstance (or even perhaps without
that assistance, for the circumstance which presents itself
at the moment when a mental state, hitherto latent, makes
itself felt, may well have had no influence whatsoever upon
that state), the image of Odette de Crécy came to absorb
the whole of his dreams, if from those dreams the memory

306 Swann’s Way