Page 574 - swanns-way

if she chose. And so she struck him with all the sharpness
and force of a headsman wielding his axe, and yet could not
be charged with cruelty, since she was quite unconscious of
hurting him; she even began to laugh, though this may per-
haps, it is true, have been chiefly to keep him from thinking
that she was ashamed, at all, or confused. ‘It’s quite true, I
hadn’t been to the Maison Dorée. I was coming away from
Forcheville’s. I had, really, been to Prévost’s—that wasn’t a
story—and he met me there and asked me to come in and
look at his prints. But some one else came to see him. I told
you that I was coming from the Maison d’Or because I was
afraid you might be angry with me. It was rather nice of
me, really, don’t you see? I admit, I did wrong, but at least
I’m telling you all about it now, a’n’t I? What have I to gain
by not telling you, straight, that I lunched with him on the
day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, if it were true? Especially as at
that time we didn’t know one another quite so well as we do
now, did we, dear?’
He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness
of the utterly spiritless creature which these crushing words
had made of him. And so, even in the months of which he
had never dared to think again, because they had been too
happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was
already lying to him! Besides that moment (that first eve-
ning on which they had ‘done a cattleya’) when she had
told him that she was coming from the Maison Dorée, how
many others must there have been, each of them covering
a falsehood of which Swann had had no suspicion. He re-
called how she had said to him once: ‘I need only tell Mme.

574 Swann’s Way