Swann's Way

immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the
power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person
seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with
poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on
which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact. Swann
could not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him
in the years that were to come. Sometimes, as he looked up from his
victoria on those fine and frosty nights of early spring, and saw the
dazzling moonbeams fall between his eyes and the deserted streets, he
would think of that other face, gleaming and faintly roseate like the
moon's, which had, one day, risen on the horizon of his mind and since
then had shed upon the world that mysterious light in which he saw it
bathed. If he arrived after the hour at which Odette sent her servants
to bed, before ringing the bell at the gate of her little garden,
he would go round first into the other street, over which, at the
ground-level, among the windows (all exactly alike, but darkened) of
the adjoining houses, shone the solitary lighted window of her room.
He would rap upon the pane, and she would hear the signal, and answer,