Page 536 - swanns-way

desire that he should do her the favour—of which it was he
who, then, had felt suspicious, as of a possibly tedious waste
of his time and disturbance of his arrangements—of grant-
ing her access to his study; how she had been obliged to beg
that he would let her take him to the Verdurins’; and, when
he did allow her to come to him once a month, how she had
first, before he would let himself be swayed, had to repeat
what a joy it would be to her, that custom of their seeing
each other daily, for which she had longed at a time when
to him it had seemed only a tiresome distraction, for which,
since that time, she had conceived a distaste and had defi-
nitely broken herself of it, while it had become for him so
insatiable, so dolorous a need. Little had he suspected how
truly he spoke when, on their third meeting, as she repeat-
ed: ‘But why don’t you let me come to you oftener?’ he had
told her, laughing, and in a vein of gallantry, that it was for
fear of forming a hopeless passion. Now, alas, it still hap-
pened at times that she wrote to him from a restaurant or
hotel, on paper which bore a printed address, but printed in
letters of fire that seared his heart. ‘Written from the Hôtel
Vouillemont. What on earth can she have gone there for?
With whom? What happened there?’ He remembered the
gas-jets that were being extinguished along the Boulevard
des Italiens when he had met her, when all hope was gone
among the errant shades upon that night which had seemed
to him almost supernatural and which now (that night of
a period when he had not even to ask himself whether he
would be annoying her by looking for her and by finding
her, so certain was he that she knew no greater happiness

536 Swann’s Way