Page 535 - swanns-way

recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the pecu-
liar, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all;
the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she
had tossed after him into his carriage, which he had kept
pressed to his lips, the address ‘Maison Dorée,’ embossed
on the note-paper on which he had read ‘My hand trembles
so as I write to you,’ the frowning contraction of her eye-
brows when she said pleadingly: ‘You won’t let it be very
long before you send for me?’; he could smell the heated
iron of the barber whom he used to have in to singe his hair
while Loredan went to fetch the little working girl; could
feel the torrents of rain which fell so often that spring, the
ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all
the network of mental habits, of seasonable impressions,
of sensory reactions, which had extended over a series of
weeks its uniform meshes, by which his body now found it-
self inextricably held. At that time he had been satisfying a
sensual curiosity to know what were the pleasures of those
people who lived for love alone. He had supposed that he
could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their
sorrows also; how small a thing the actual charm of Odette
was now in comparison with that formidable terror which
extended it like a cloudy halo all around her, that enormous
anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and night
what she had been doing, of not possessing her wholly, at
all times and in all places! Alas, he recalled the accents in
which she had exclaimed: ‘But I can see you at any time; I
am always free!’—she, who was never free now; the interest,
the curiosity that she had shewn in his life, her passionate

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