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By Root 1241 0

in the furthest recesses of his mind where his determination had thrust it away thanks to the long interval of the three weeks’ separation which he had accepted, it was with pleasure that he considered the idea that he would see Odette again on her return; but it was also with so little impatience that he began to wonder whether he would not readily consent to the doubling of the period of so easy an abstinence. It had lasted, so far, but three days, a much shorter time than he had often spent without seeing Odette, and without having, as on this occasion, premeditated it. And yet, suddenly, some minor vexation or physical ailment—by inciting him to regard the present moment as an exceptional one, outside the rules, one in which common wisdom would allow him to take advantage of the soothing effects of a pleasure and, until there was some purpose in a resumption of effort, to give his will a rest—suspended the operation of the latter, which ceased to exert its inhibitive control; or, without that even, the thought of something he had forgotten to ask Odette, such as whether she had decided in what colour she would have her carriage repainted, or, with regard to some investment, whether they were ordinary or preference shares that she wished him to buy (for it was all very well to show her that he could live without seeing her, but if, after that, the carriage had to be painted over again, or if the shares produced no dividend, a lot of good it would have done him)—and suddenly, like a stretched piece of elastic which is let go, or the air in a pneumatic machine which is ripped open, the idea of seeing her again sprang back from the distant depths in which it lay dormant into the field of the present and of immediate possibilities.

It sprang back thus without meeting any further resistance, so irresistible, in fact, that Swann had found it far less painful to watch the fortnight he was to spend separated from Odette creeping by day after day than to wait the ten minutes it took his coachman to bring round the carriage which was to take him to her, minutes which he spent in transports of impatience and joy, in which he recaptured a thousand times over, to lavish on it all the wealth of his affection, that idea of meeting her again which, by so abrupt a reversal, at a moment when he supposed it so remote, was once more present and on the very surface of his consciousness. The fact was that his idea no longer found as an obstacle in its course the desire to resist it without further delay, a desire which had ceased to have any place in Swann’s mind since, having proved to himself—or so at least he believed—that he was so easily capable of resisting it, he no longer saw any danger in postponing a plan of separation which he was now certain of being able to put into operation whenever he wished. Furthermore, this idea of seeing her again came back to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence, which long habit had dulled but which had been retempered during this privation, not of three days but of a fortnight (for a period of abstinence may be calculated, by anticipation, as having lasted already until the final date assigned to it), and had converted what had been until then a pleasure in store which could easily be sacrificed into an unlooked-for happiness which he was powerless to resist. Finally, the idea returned to him embellished by his ignorance of what Odette might have thought, might perhaps have done, on finding that he had given no sign of life, with the result that what he was going now to find was the entrancing revelation of an almost unknown Odette.

But she, just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was only a sham, saw nothing but a pretext in the questions he was now coming to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage or the purchase of shares. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these crises through which he was passing, and the notion she had formed of them omitted any attempt to understand their mechanism, but looked only to what she knew beforehand,