Page 368 - swanns-way

whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must
bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his
life,—to feel himself transformed into a creature foreign to
humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a
fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the
world through his two ears alone. And as, notwithstanding,
he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his in-
telligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of
intoxication must he strip bare his innermost soul of the
whole armour of reason, and make it pass, unattended,
through the straining vessel, down into the dark filter of
sound. He began to reckon up how much that was painful,
perhaps even how much secret and unap-peased sorrow un-
derlay the sweetness of the phrase; and yet to him it brought
no suffering. What matter though the phrase repeated that
love is frail and fleeting, when his love was so strong! He
played with the melancholy which the phrase diffused, he
felt it stealing over him, but like a caress which only deep-
ened and sweetened his sense of his own happiness. He
would make Odette play him the phrase again, ten, twenty
times on end, insisting that, while she played, she must nev-
er cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in
those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring
into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed
one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to
count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as to count the flow-
ers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to stop,
saying: ‘How do you expect me to play when you keep on
holding me? I can’t do everything at once. Make up your

368 Swann’s Way