know if you were feeling better."

He looked up. Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window, one
of them with a lamp in his hand; and beyond them he could see into
the room, a room that he had never seen before. Having fallen into the
habit, When he came late to Odette, of identifying her window by
the fact that it was the only one still lighted in a row of windows
otherwise all alike, he had been misled, this time, by the light, and
had knocked at the window beyond hers, in the adjoining house. He made
what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction
of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having
feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference,
he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof
of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and
finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other
enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he ceased even to
think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering
course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would
startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness,
and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain. As though this had
been a bodily pain, Swann's mind was powerless to alleviate it; in the
case of bodily pain, however, since it is independent of the mind, the
mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has
momentarily ceased. But with this mental pain, the mind, merely by
recalling it, created it afresh. To determine not to think of it was but
to think of it still, to suffer from it still. And when, in conversation
with his friends, he forgot his sufferings, suddenly a word casually
uttered would make him change countenance as a wounded man does when a
clumsy hand has touched his aching limb. When he came away from Odette,
he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled the smile with which, in gentle
mockery, she had spoken to him of this man or of that, a smile which was
all tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which
she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as
though against her will, upon his lips, as she had done on that first
evening in the carriage; her languishing gaze at him while she lay
nestling in his arms, her bended head seeming to recede between her
shoulders, as though shrinking from the cold.

But