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them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning
of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to
themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the
letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love,
we find fault with the ‘water’ of a stone, or with the words of
a sentence because they are not fashioned exclusively from
the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a ‘lass unparalleled.’
It would happen, as often as not, that he had stayed so
long outside, with his little girl, before going to the Ver-
durins’ that, as soon as the little phrase had been rendered
by the pianist, Swann would discover that it was almost
time for Odette to go home. He used to take her back as
far as the door of her little house in the Rue La Pérouse,
behind the Arc de Triomphe. And it was perhaps on this
account, and so as not to demand the monopoly of her fa-
vours, that he sacrificed the pleasure (not so essential to his
well-being) of seeing her earlier in the evening, of arriving
with her at the Verdurins’, to the exercise of this other privi-
lege, for which she was grateful, of their leaving together; a
privilege which he valued all the more because, thanks to
it, he had the feeling that no one else would see her, no one
would thrust himself between them, no one could prevent
him from remaining with her in spirit, after he had left her
for the night.
And so, night after night, she would be taken home in
Swann’s carriage; and one night, after she had got down,
and while he stood at the gate and murmured ‘Till to-
morrow, then!’ she turned impulsively from him, plucked
a last lingering chrysanthemum in the tiny garden which

338 Swann’s Way