n scarcely write----"; and these letters he had
kept in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum. Or else, if she
had not had time to write, when he arrived at the Verdurins' she would
come running up to him with an "I've something to say to you!" and he
would gaze curiously at the revelation in her face and speech of what
she had hitherto kept concealed from him of her heart.

Even as he drew near to the Verdurins' door, and caught sight of the
great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-room windows, whose shutters were
never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming
creature whom he would see, as he entered the room, basking in that
golden light. Here and there the figures of the guests stood out, sharp
and black, between lamp and window, shutting off the light, like those
little pictures which one sees sometimes pasted here and there upon a
glass screen, whose other panes are mere transparencies. He would try
to make out Odette. And then, when he was once inside, without thinking,
his eyes sparkled suddenly with such radiant happiness that M. Verdurin
said to the painter: "H'm. Seems to be getting warm." Indeed, her
presence gave the house what none other of the houses that he visited
seemed to possess: a sort of tactual sense, a nervous system which
ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his
heart.

And so the simple and regular manifestations of a social organism,
namely the 'little clan,' were transformed for Swann into a series of
daily encounters with Odette, and enabled him to feign indifference to
the prospect of seeing her, or even a desire not to see her; in doing
which he incurred no very great risk since, even although he had written
to her during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening and
accompany her home.

But one evening, when, irritated by the thought of that inevitable dark
drive together, he had taken his other 'little girl' all the way to the
Bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance at
the Verdurins', he was so late in reaching them that Odette, supposing
that he did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room bare
of her, Swann felt his heart wrung by sudden anguish; he shook with the
sense that he was being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he began
then for the first time to estimate, having always, hitherto, had that
certainty of finding it whenever he would, which (as in the case of
all o