Page 432 - swanns-way

gles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its
proper place was elsewhere.
‘She admits that she heard me ring, and then knock, that
she knew it was myself, that she wanted to see me,’ Swann
thought to himself. ‘But that doesn’t correspond with the
fact that she did not let me in.’
He did not, however, draw her attention to this incon-
sistency, for he thought that, if left to herself, Odette might
perhaps produce some falsehood which would give him a
faint indication of the truth; she spoke; he did not inter-
rupt her, he gathered up, with an eager and sorrowful piety,
the words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly feeling,
since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke)
that, like the veil of a sanctuary, they kept a vague imprint,
traced a faint outline of that infinitely precious and, alas,
undiscoverable truth;—what she had been doing, that af-
ternoon, at three o’clock, when he had called,—a truth of
which he would never possess any more than these falsifica-
tions, illegible and divine traces, a truth which would exist
henceforward only in the secretive memory of this creature,
who would contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value,
but would never yield it up to him. It was true that he had,
now and then, a strong suspicion that Odette’s daily activi-
ties were not hi themselves passionately interesting, and
that such relations as she might have with other men did
not exhale, naturally, in a universal sense, or for every ra-
tional being, a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting
with fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised, at such mo-
ments, that that interest, that gloom, existed in him only

432 Swann’s Way