Page 350 - swanns-way

ting warm.’ Indeed, her presence gave the house what none
other of the houses that he visited seemed to possess: a sort
of tactual sense, a nervous system which ramified into each
of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his heart.
And so the simple and regular manifestations of a so-
cial organism, namely the ‘little clan,’ were transformed for
Swann into a series of daily encounters with Odette, and en-
abled him to feign indifference to the prospect of seeing her,
or even a desire not to see her; in doing which he incurred
no very great risk since, even although he had written to her
during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening
and accompany her home.
But one evening, when, irritated by the thought of that
inevitable dark drive together, he had taken his other ‘little
girl’ all the way to the Bois, so as to delay as long as pos-
sible the moment of his appearance at the Verdurins’, he
was so late in reaching them that Odette, supposing that he
did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room
bare of her, Swann felt his heart wrung by sudden anguish;
he shook with the sense that he was being deprived of a
pleasure whose intensity he began then for the first time
to estimate, having always, hitherto, had that certainty of
finding it whenever he would, which (as in the case of all
our pleasures) reduced, if it did not altogether blind him to
its dimensions.
‘Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she
wasn’t here?’ M. Verdurin asked his wife. ‘I think we may
say that he’s hooked.’
‘The face he pulled?’ exploded Dr. Cottard who, having

350 Swann’s Way