every feature how
painful, what a torture it was to her to act a lie; and, while in her
answer she multiplied the fictitious details of an imaginary illness,
seeming to ask pardon, by her suppliant look and her stricken accents,
for the obvious falsehood of her words.

On certain days, however, though these came seldom, she would call upon
him in the afternoon, to interrupt his musings or the essay on Ver-meer
to which he had latterly returned. His servant would come in to say that
Mme. de Crecy was in the small drawing-room. He would go in search of
her, and, when he opened the door, on Odette's blushing countenance, as
soon as she caught sight of Swann, would appear--changing the curve
of her lips, the look in her eyes, the moulding of her cheeks--an
all-absorbing smile. Once he was left alone he would see again that
smile, and her smile of the day before, another with which she had
greeted him sometime else, the smile which had been her answer, in the
carriage that night, when he had asked her whether she objected to his
rearranging her cattleyas; and the life of Odette at all other times,
since he knew nothing of it, appeared to him upon a neutral and
colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon
which one sees, here and there, in every corner and in all directions,
traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles. But,
once in a while, illuminating a chink of that existence which Swann
still saw as a complete blank, even if his mind assured him that it was
not so, because he was unable to imagine anything that might occupy it,
some friend who knew them both, and suspecting that they were in love,
had not dared to tell him anything about her that was of the least
importance, would describe Odette's figure, as he had seen her, that
very morning, going on foot up the Rue Abbattucci, in a cape trimmed
with skunks, wearing a Rembrandt hat, and a bunch of violets in her
bosom. This simple outline reduced Swann to utter confusion by enabling
him suddenly to perceive that Odette had an existence which was not
wholly subordinated to his own; he burned to know whom she had been
seeking to fascinate by this costume in which he had never seen her; he
registered a vow to insist upon her telling him where she had been going
at that intercepted moment, as though, in all the colourless life--a
life almost nonexistent, since she was then invisible to him--of his
mistress, there had been but a