Page 556 - swanns-way

ing he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he
was not familiar as being identical with the part with which
he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the
light of what was revealed. At such times as he spent with
Odette, if their conversation turned upon an indelicate act
committed, or an indelicate sentiment expressed by some
third person, she would ruthlessly condemn the culprit by
virtue of the same moral principles which Swann had al-
ways heard expressed by his own parents, and to which he
himself had remained loyal; and then, she would arrange
her flowers, would sip her tea, would shew an interest in his
work. So Swann extended those habits to fill the rest of her
life, he reconstructed those actions when he wished to form
a picture of the moments in which he and she were apart. If
anyone had portrayed her to him as she was, or rather as she
had been for so long with himself, but had substituted some
other man, he would have been distressed, for such a por-
trait would have struck him as lifelike. But to suppose that
she went to bad houses, that she abandoned herself to orgies
with other women, that she led the crapulous existence of
the most abject, the most contemptible of mortals—would
be an insane wandering of the mind, for the realisation of
which, thank heaven, the chrysanthemums that he could
imagine, the daily cups of tea, the virtuous indignation left
neither time nor place. Only, now and again, he gave Odette
to understand that people maliciously kept him informed of
everything that she did; and making opportune use of some
detail—insignificant but true—which he had accidentally
learned, as though it were the sole fragment which he would

556 Swann’s Way