Page 493 - swanns-way

would pass a finger over his tired eyelids, in the same way as
he might have wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogeth-
er to think. There emerged, however, from this unexplored
tract, certain occupations which reappeared from time to
time, vaguely connected by Odette with some obligation to-
wards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as they
were the only people whom she was in the habit of mention-
ing as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to
compose the necessary, unalterable setting of her life. Be-
cause of the tone in which she referred, from time to time,
to ‘the day when I go with my friend to the Hippodrome,’ if,
when he felt unwell and had thought, ‘Perhaps Odette would
be kind and come to see me,’ he remembered, suddenly, that
it was one of those very days, he would correct himself with
an ‘Oh, no! It’s not worth while asking her to come; I should
have thought of it before, this is the day when she goes with
her friend to the Hippodrome. We must confine ourselves
to what is possible; no use wasting our time in proposing
things that can’t be accepted and are declined in advance.’
And this duty that was incumbent upon Odette, of going to
the Hippodrome, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to
him to be not merely ineluctable in itself; but the mark of
necessity which stamped it seemed to make plausible and
legitimate everything that was even remotely connected
with it. If, when Odette, in the street, had acknowledged the
salute of a passer-by, which had aroused Swann’s jealousy,
she replied to his questions by associating the stranger with
any of the two or three paramount duties of which she had
often spoken to him; if, for instance, she said: ‘That’s a gen-

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