Page 369 - swanns-way

mind what you want; am I to play the phrase or do you want
to play with me?’ Then he would become annoyed, and she
would burst out with a laugh which, was transformed, as it
left her lips, and descended upon him in a shower of kisses.
Or else she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once
again a face worthy to figure in Botticelli’s ‘Life of Moses,’
he would place it there, giving to Odette’s neck the neces-
sary inclination; and when he had finished her portrait in
distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Six-
tine, the idea that she was, none the less, in the room with
him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be
kissed and won, the idea of her material existence, of her be-
ing alive, would sweep over him with so violent an
intoxication that, with eyes starting from his head and jaws
that parted as though to devour her, he would fling himself
upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks.
And then, as soon as he had left the house, not without re-
turning to kiss her once again, because he had forgotten to
take away with him, in memory, some detail of her fra-
grance or of her features, while he drove home in his victoria,
blessing the name of Odette who allowed him to pay her
these daily visits, which, although they could not, he felt,
bring any great happiness to her, still, by keeping him im-
mune from the fever of jealousy—by removing from him
every possibility of a fresh outbreak of the heart-sickness
which had manifested itself in him that evening, when he
had failed to find her at the Verdurins’—might help him to
arrive, without any recurrence of those crises, of which the
first had been so distressing that it must also be the last, at

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