Page 470 - swanns-way

to find something atrocious, unpardonable, in this desire
(after all, so natural a desire, springing from a childlike in-
genuousness and also from a certain delicacy in her nature)
to be able, in her turn, when an occasion offered, to repay
the Verdurins for their hospitality, and to play the hostess in
a house of her own.
He returned to the other point of view—opposite to that
of his love and of his jealousy, to which he resorted at times
by a sort of mental equity, and in order to make allowance
for different eventualities—from which he tried to form a
fresh judgment of Odette, based on the supposition that he
had never been in love with her, that she was to him just a
woman like other women, that her life had not been (when-
ever he himself was not present) different, a texture woven
in secret apart from him, and warped against him.
Wherefore believe that she would enjoy down there
with Forcheville or with other men intoxicating pleasures
which she had never known with him, and which his jeal-
ousy alone had fabricated in all their elements? At Bayreuth,
as in Paris, if it should happen that Forcheville thought of
him at all, it would only be as of some one who counted for
a great deal in the life of Odette, some one for whom he
was obliged to make way, when they met in her house. If
Forcheville and she scored a triumph by being down there
together in spite of him, it was he who had engineered that
triumph by striving in vain to prevent her from going there,
whereas if he had approved of her plan, which for that mat-
ter was quite defensible, she would have had the appearance
of being there by his counsel, she would have felt herself sent

470 Swann’s Way