r the
gratification of other tastes from which he knew that pleasure was to be
expected (at least, before he had fallen in love) such as his taste for
collecting things, or for good cooking.

When he proposed to take leave of Odette, and to return home, she begged
him to stay a little longer, and even detained him forcibly, seizing him
by the arm as he was opening the door to go. But he gave no thought to
that, for, among the crowd of gestures and speeches and other little
incidents which go to make up a conversation, it is inevitable that we
should pass (without noticing anything that arouses our interest) by
those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching,
whereas we stop to examine others beneath which nothing lies concealed.
She kept on saying: "What a dreadful pity; you never by any chance come
in the afternoon, and the one time you do come then I miss you." He knew
very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so
keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit, but as she was a
good-natured woman, anxious to give him pleasure, and often sorry when
she had done anything that annoyed him, he found it quite natural that
she should be sorry, on this occasion, that she had deprived him of that
pleasure of spending an hour in her company, which was so very great a
pleasure, if not to herself, at any rate to him. All the same, it was a
matter of so little importance that her air of unrelieved sorrow began
at length to bewilder him. She reminded him, even more than was
usual, of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of
the Primavera.' She had, at that moment, their downcast, heartbroken
expression, which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief
too heavy to be borne, when they are merely allowing the Infant Jesus to
play with a pomegranate, or watching Moses pour water into a trough. He
had seen the same sorrow once before on her face, but when, he could
no longer say. Then, suddenly, he remembered it; it was when Odette had
lied, in apologising to Mme. Verdurin on the evening after the dinner
from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness, but really so
that she might be alone with Swann. Surely, even had she been the most
scrupulous of women, she could hardly have felt remorse for so innocent
a lie. But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and
served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most
terrib