invited as a spectator when
a prize is given to the child whom she has reared and loves. Perhaps,
moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not
yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for
the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his
departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view
of a country to which he may never return.

But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which
had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete
surrender, whether from fear of chilling her, or from reluctance to
appear, even retrospectively, to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked
the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which
could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first
occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If
she had any cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: "It is most
unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've
not been disturbed as they were the other night; I think, though, that
this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than
the others?" Or else, if she had none: "Oh! no cattleyas this evening;
then there's nothing for me to arrange." So that for some time there
was no change from the procedure which he had followed on that first
evening, when he had started by touching her throat, with his fingers
first and then with his lips, but their caresses began invariably with
this modest exploration. And long afterwards, when the arrangement (or,
rather, the ritual pretence of an arrangement) of her cattleyas had
quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor "Do a cattleya," transmuted
into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its
original meaning when they wished to refer to the act of physical
possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing),
survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long forgotten custom
from which it sprang. And yet possibly this particular manner of saying
"to make love" had not the precise significance of its synonyms.
However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard
the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable
and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be
described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure
if the women concerned be