Page 497 - swanns-way

which numbers of other women asked for nothing better
than to be allowed to devote themselves, though it is only
fair to add that in those other women’s hands the noble task
would have seemed to Swann nothing more than an indis-
creet and intolerable usurpation of his freedom of action. ‘If
she didn’t love me, just a little,’ he told himself, ‘she would
not wish to have me altered. To alter me, she will have to
see me more often.’ And so he was able to trace, in these
faults which she found in him, a proof at least of her inter-
est, perhaps even of her love; and, in fact, she gave him so
little, now, of the last, that he was obliged to regard as proofs
of her interest in him the various things which, every now
and then, she forbade him to do. One day she announced
that she did not care for his coachman, who, she thought,
was perhaps setting Swann against her, and, anyhow, did
not shew that promptness and deference to Swann’s orders
which she would have liked to see. She felt that he wanted
to hear her say: ‘Don’t have him again when you come to
me,’ just as he might have wanted her to kiss him. So, be-
ing in a good temper, she said it; and he was deeply moved.
That evening, when talking to M. de Charlus, with whom he
had the satisfaction of being able to speak of her openly (for
the most trivial remarks that he uttered now, even to people
who had never heard of her, had always some sort of refer-
ence to Odette), he said to him:
‘I believe, all the same, that she loves me; she is so nice to
me now, and she certainly takes an interest in what I do.’
And if, when he was starting off for her house, getting
into his carriage with a friend whom he was to drop some-

497