Page 548 - swanns-way

year; leaning from the window of the train towards a young
man on the platform who wept as he bade him farewell, he
was seeking to persuade this young man to come away also.
The train began to move; he awoke in alarm, and remem-
bered that he was not going away, that he would see Odette
that evening, and next day and almost every day. And then,
being still deeply moved by his dream, he would thank
heaven for those special circumstances which made him
independent, thanks to which he could remain in Odette’s
vicinity, and could even succeed in making her allow him to
see her sometimes; and, counting over the list of his advan-
tages: his social position—his fortune, from which she stood
too often in need of assistance not to shrink from the pros-
pect of a definite rupture (having even, so people said, an
ulterior plan of getting him to marry her)—his friendship
with M. de Charlus, which, it must be confessed, had never
won him any very great favour from Odette, but which gave
him the pleasant feeling that she was always hearing com-
plimentary things said about him by this common friend
for whom she had so great an esteem—and even his own
intelligence, the whole of which he employed in weaving,
every day, a fresh plot which would make his presence, if
not agreeable, at any rate necessary to Odette —he thought
of what might have happened to him if all these advantag-
es had been lacking, he thought that, if he had been, like
so many other men, poor and humble, without resources,
forced to undertake any task that might be offered to him,
or tied down by parents or by a wife, he might have been
obliged to part from Odette, that that dream, the terror of

548 Swann’s Way