Swann's Way

tricked, now it was he that saw them, confident and persistent in
their error, tricked and trapped by none other than himself, whom they
believed to be a mile away, but who was there, in person, there with a
plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to
tap upon the shutter. And, perhaps, what he felt (almost an agreeable
feeling) at that moment was something more than relief at the solution
of a doubt, at the soothing of a pain; was an intellectual pleasure.
If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the
delicate attraction that they had had for him long ago--though only when
a light was shed upon them by a thought, a memory of Odette--now it was
another of the faculties, prominent in the studious days of his youth,
that Odette had quickened with new life, the passion for truth, but for
a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress,
receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the
sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost
impersonal in its absolute beauty) was Odette--Odette in her activities,
her environment, her projects, and her past. At every other period in