Page 365 - swanns-way

there must certainly be a woman somewhere who insists on
his going to her at all hours,’ made him feel that he was lead-
ing the life of the class of men whose existence is coloured
by a love-affair, and in whom the perpetual sacrifice which
they are making of their comfort and of their practical in-
terests has engendered a spiritual charm. Then, though he
may not consciously have taken this into consideration, the
certainty that she was waiting for him, that she was not any-
where or with anyone else, that he would see her before he
went home, drew the sting from that anguish, forgotten, it is
true, but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which he
had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins’
before his arrival, an anguish the actual cessation of which
was so agreeable that it might even be called a state of hap-
piness. Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that there
must be attributed the importance which Odette had since
assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so immate-
rial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them
the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to our-
selves, that person seems at once to belong to a different
universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a
vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person
and ourselves are ever more or less in contact. Swann could
not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to
him in the years that were to come. Sometimes, as he looked
up from his victoria on those fine and frosty nights of early
spring, and saw the dazzling moonbeams fall between his
eyes and the deserted streets, he would think of that other
face, gleaming and faintly roseate like the moon’s, which

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