r the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata. I am devoted
to Odette, but really--to expound theories of aesthetic to her--the man
must be a prize idiot."

"Look here, I won't have you saying nasty things about Odette," broke in
Mme. Verdurin in her 'spoiled child' manner. "She is charming."

"There's no reason why she shouldn't be charming; we are not saying
anything nasty about her, only that she is not the embodiment of either
virtue or intellect. After all," he turned to the painter, "does it
matter so very much whether she is virtuous or not? You can't tell; she
might be a great deal less charming if she were."

On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins' butler, who had been
somewhere else a moment earlier, when he arrived, and who had been asked
by Odette to tell Swann (but that was at least an hour ago) that she
would probably stop to drink a cup of chocolate at Prevost's on her
way home. Swann set off at once for Prevost's, but every few yards
his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street,
loathsome obstacles each of which he would gladly have crushed beneath
his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling with a note-book would
delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He
counted the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to
be quite certain that he had not given himself short measure, and so,
possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his
arriving at Prevost's in time, and of finding her still there. And then,
in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep
and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his
mind has been wandering without any clear distinction between himself
and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the
thoughts which he had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard
at the Verdurins' that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from
which he was suffering, but of which he was only now conscious, as
though he had just woken up. What! all this disturbance simply because
he would not see Odette, now, till to-morrow, exactly what he had been
hoping, not an hour before, as he drove toward Mme. Verdurin's. He was
obliged to admit also that now, as he sat in the same carriage and
drove to Prevost's, he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone
even--but that a new personality was there beside him, adhering to him,
amalgamated