Swann's Way

to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence,
all of which long habit had enfeebled, but which had acquired new vigour
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 with its beauty enhanced by
his own ignorance of what Odette might have thought, might, perhaps,
have done on finding that he shewed no sign of life, with the result
that he was going now to meet with the entrancing revelation of an
Odette almost unknown.

But she, just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was
only a feint, saw nothing but a pretext in the question which he came,
now, to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage, or the purchase
of stock. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these
crises through which he passed, and in the general idea which she formed
of them she made no attempt to understand their mechanism, looking only