he could be proved
to have gone abroad, and who (he ultimately learned) was an uncle of
Odette, and had been dead for twenty years.

Although she would not allow him, as a rule, to meet her at public
gatherings, saying that people would talk, it happened occasionally
that, at an evening party to which he and she had each been invited--at
Forcheville's, at the painter's, or at a charity ball given in one of
the Ministries--he found himself in the same room with her. He could
see her, but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be
spying upon the pleasures which she tasted in other company, pleasures
which--while he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed,
as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the
evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray--seemed illimitable to
him since he had not been able to see their end. And, once or twice,
he derived from such evenings that kind of happiness which one would be
inclined (did it not originate in so violent a reaction from an anxiety
abruptly terminated) to call peaceful, since it consists in a pacifying
of the mind: he had looked in for a moment at a revel in the painter's
studio, and was getting ready to go home; he was leaving behind him
Odette, transformed into a brilliant stranger, surrounded by men to whom
her glances and her gaiety, which were not for him, seemed to hint at
some voluptuous pleasure to be enjoyed there or elsewhere (possibly at
the Bal des Incoherents, to which he trembled to think that she might be
going on afterwards) which made Swann more jealous than the thought of
their actual physical union, since it was more difficult to imagine; he
was opening the door to go, when he heard himself called back in these
words (which, by cutting off from the party that possible ending which
had so appalled him, made the party itself seem innocent in retrospect,
made Odette's return home a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible,
but tender and familiar, a thing that kept close to his side, like
a part of his own daily life, in his carriage; a thing that stripped
Odette herself of the excess of brilliance and gaiety in her appearance,
shewed that it was only a disguise which she had assumed for a moment,
for his sake and not in view of any mysterious pleasures, a disguise of
which she had already wearied)--in these words, which Odette flung out
after him as he was crossing the threshold: "Can't you wait a minute for