Page 371 - swanns-way

he never asked himself what she might be doing, or what
her life had been. Only he smiled sometimes at the thought
of how, some years earlier, when he still did not know her,
some one had spoken to him of a woman who, if he remem-
bered rightly, must certainly have been Odette, as of a ‘tart,’
a ‘kept’ woman, one of those women to whom he still attrib-
uted (having lived but little in their company) the entire set
of characteristics, fundamentally perverse, with which they
had been, for many years, endowed by the imagination of
certain novelists. He would say to himself that one has, as
often as not, only to take the exact counterpart of the repu-
tation created by the world in order to judge a person fairly,
when with such a character he contrasted that of Odette,
so good, so simple, so enthusiastic in the pursuit of ideals,
so nearly incapable of not telling the truth that, when he
had once begged her, so that they might dine together alone,
to write to Mme. Verdurin, saying that she was unwell, the
next day he had seen her, face to face with Mme. Verdurin,
who asked whether she had recovered, blushing, stammer-
ing, and, in spite of herself, revealing in every feature how
painful, what a torture it was to her to act a lie; and, while in
her answer she multiplied the fictitious details of an imagi-
nary illness, seeming to ask pardon, by her suppliant look
and her stricken accents, for the obvious falsehood of her
words.
On certain days, however, though these came seldom,
she would call upon him in the afternoon, to interrupt his
musings or the essay on Ver-meer to which he had latter-
ly returned. His servant would come in to say that Mme.

371