Page 571 - swanns-way

out feeling any twinge of that old rending pain; meanwhile
he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into furnishing
him with fresh sentences, with the names of more places
and people and of different events, which, when his malady
was still scarcely healed, would make it break out again in
another form.
But, often enough, the things that he did not know, that
he dreaded, now, to learn, it was Odette herself who, sponta-
neously and without thought of what she did, revealed them
to him; for the gap which her vices made between her actual
life and the comparatively innocent life which Swann had
believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead, was
far wider than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting
the same air of virtue before people whom he is anxious to
keep from having any suspicion of his vices, has no regis-
ter, no gauge at hand from which he may ascertain bow far
those vices (their continuous growth being imperceptible
by himself) have gradually segregated him from the normal
ways of life. In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette’s
mind, with the memory of those of her actions which she
concealed from Swann, her other, her innocuous actions
were gradually coloured, infected by these, without her be-
ing able to detect anything strange in them, without their
causing any explosion in the particular region of herself in
which she made them live, but when she related them to
Swann, he was overwhelmed by the revelation of the duplic-
ity to which they pointed. One day, he was trying—without
hurting Odette—to discover from her whether she had ever
had any dealings with procuresses. He was, as a matter of

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