r each
of which he would feel himself increasingly relieved, for he very
soon learned that Odette had spent her evening in the most innocent of
dissipations.

"But what do you mean, my dear Meme, I don't quite understand.... You
didn't go straight from her house to the Musee Grevin? Surely you went
somewhere else first? No? That is very odd! You don't know how amusing
you are, my dear Meme. But what an odd idea of hers to go on to the Chat
Noir afterwards; it was her idea, I suppose? No? Yours? That's strange.
After all, it wasn't a bad idea; she must have known dozens of people
there? No? She never spoke to a soul? How extraordinary! Then you sat
there like that, just you and she, all by yourselves? I can picture you,
sitting there! You are a worthy fellow, my dear Meme; I'm exceedingly
fond of you."

Swann was now quite at ease. To him, who had so often happened, when
talking to friends who knew nothing of his love, friends to whom he
hardly listened, to hear certain detached sentences (as, for instance,
"I saw Mme. de Crecy yesterday; she was with a man I didn't know."),
sentences which dropped into his heart and passed at once into a solid
state, grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him as they lay
there irremovable,--how charming, by way of contrast, were the words:
"She didn't know a soul; she never spoke to a soul." How freely they
coursed through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to
breathe! And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette
must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred
to his company. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him,
pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery.

Even when he could not discover where she had gone, it would have
sufficed to alleviate the anguish that he then felt, for which Odette's
presence, the charm of her company, was the sole specific (a specific
which in the long run served, like many other remedies, to aggravate the
disease, but at least brought temporary relief to his sufferings), it
would have sufficed, had Odette only permitted him to remain in her
house while she was out, to wait there until that hour of her return,
into whose stillness and peace would flow, to be mingled and lost there,
all memory of those intervening hours which some sorcery, some cursed
spell had made him imagine as, somehow, different from the rest. But she
would not; he must return home; he