Page 463 - swanns-way

and are lost in the shadow of the object itself, all the terrible
and disturbing ideas which he had formed of Odette melt-
ed away and vanished in the charming creature who stood
there before his eyes. He had the sudden suspicion that this
hour spent in Odette’s house, in the lamp-light, was, per-
haps, after all, not an artificial hour, invented for his special
use (with the object of concealing that frightening and deli-
cious thing which was incessantly in his thoughts without
his ever being able to form a satisfactory impression of it, an
hour of Odette’s real life, of her life when he was not there,
looking on) with theatrical properties and pasteboard
fruits, but was perhaps a genuine hour of Odette’s life; that,
if he himself had not been there, she would have pulled for-
ward the same armchair for Forcheville, would have poured
out for him, not any unknown brew, but precisely that or-
angeade which she was now offering to them both; that the
world inhabited by Odette was not that other world, fear-
ful and supernatural, in which he spent his time in placing
her—and which existed, perhaps, only in his imagination,
but the real universe, exhaling no special atmosphere of
gloom, comprising that table at which he might sit down,
presently, and write, and this drink which he was being per-
mitted, now, to taste; all the objects which he contemplated
with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if,
in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an
obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the
absorption; they shewed him the palpable realisation of
his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape
and grew solid before-his eyes, and at the same time they

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