Page 591 - swanns-way

should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought
once again of his dream; he saw once again, as he had felt
them close beside him, Odette’s pallid complexion, her
too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the
things which—in the course of those successive bursts of
affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette
a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed
of her—he had ceased to observe after the first few days of
their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his
memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those
things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which re-
appeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and
lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality,
he cried out in his heart: ‘To think that I have wasted years
of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love
that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not
please me, who was not in my style!’

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