In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [175]
When he proposed to take leave of Odette and return home, she begged him to stay a little longer and even detained him forcibly, seizing him by the arm as he was opening the door to go. But he paid no heed to this, for among the multiplicity of gestures, remarks, little incidents that go to make up a conversation, it is inevitable that we should pass (without noticing anything that attracts our attention) close by those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching, whereas we stop to examine others beneath which nothing lies concealed. She kept on saying: “What a dreadful pity—you never come in the afternoon, and the one time you do come I miss you.” He knew very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit, but since she was good-natured, anxious to make him happy, and often, grieved when she had offended him, he found it quite natural that she should be sorry on this occasion for having deprived him of the pleasure of spending an hour in her company, which was so very great, if not for her, at any rate for him. All the same, it was a matter of so little importance that her air of unrelieved sorrow began at length to astonish him. She reminded him, even more than usual, of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of the “Primavera.” She had at this moment their downcast, heart-broken expression, which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief too heavy to be borne when they are merely allowing the Infant Jesus to play with a pomegranate or watching Moses pour water into a trough. He had seen the same sorrow once before on her face, but when, he could no longer say. Then, suddenly, he remembered: it was when Odette had lied in apologising to Mme Verdurin on the evening after the dinner from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness, but really so that she might be alone with Swann. Surely, even had she been the most scrupulous of women, she could hardly have felt remorse for so innocent a lie. But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defence, unconfident of success, she felt like weeping from sheer exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. Moreover she knew that her lie was usually wounding to the man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at his mercy if she told it badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and guilty in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent with a consciousness of wrongdoing.
What depressing lie was she now concocting for Swann’s benefit, to give her that doleful expression, that plaintive voice, which seemed to falter beneath the effort she was forcing herself to make, and to plead for mercy? He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him, but something more immediate, something, possibly, that had not yet happened, that was imminent, and