Page 498 - swanns-way

where on the way, his friend said: ‘Hullo! that isn’t Loredan
on the box?’ with what melancholy joy would Swann an-
swer him:
‘Oh! Good heavens, no! I can tell you, I daren’t take Lore-
dan when I go to the Rue La Pérouse; Odette doesn’t like
me to have Loredan, she thinks he doesn’t suit me. What
on earth is one to do? Women, you know, women. My dear
fellow, she would be furious. Oh, lord, yes; I’ve only to take
Rémi there; I should never hear the last of it!’
These new manners, indifferent, listless, irritable, which
Odette now adopted with Swann, undoubtedly made him
suffer; but he did not realise how much he suffered; since
it had been with a regular progression, day after day, that
Odette had chilled towards him, it was only by directly con-
trasting what she was to-day with what she had been at first
that he could have measured the extent of the change that
had taken place. Now this change was his deep, his secret
wound, which pained him day and night, and whenever he
felt that his thoughts were straying too near it, he would
quickly turn them into another channel for fear of being
made to suffer too keenly. He might say to himself in a
vague way: ‘There was a time when Odette loved me more,’
but he never formed any definite picture of that time. Just as
he had in his study a cupboard at which he contrived never
to look, which he turned aside to avoid passing whenever he
entered or left the room, because in one of its drawers he had
locked away the chrysanthemum which she had given him
on one of those first evenings when he had taken her home
in his carriage, and the letters in which she said: ‘Why did

498 Swann’s Way