tte almost unknown.

But she, just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was
only a feint, saw nothing but a pretext in the question which he came,
now, to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage, or the purchase
of stock. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these
crises through which he passed, and in the general idea which she formed
of them she made no attempt to understand their mechanism, looking only
to what she knew beforehand, their necessary, never-failing and always
identical termination. An imperfect idea (though possibly all the more
profound in consequence), if one were to judge it from the point of
view of Swann, who would doubtless have considered that Odette failed
to understand him, just as a morphinomaniac or a consumptive, each
persuaded that he has been thrown back, one by some outside event,
at the moment when he was just going to shake himself free from his
inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition at the
moment when he was just going to be finally cured, feels himself to be
misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance
to these pretended contingencies, mere disguises, according to him,
assumed, so as to be perceptible by his patients, by the vice of one
and the morbid state of the other, which in reality have never ceased
to weigh heavily and incurably upon them while they were nursing their
dreams of normality and health. And, as a matter of fact, Swann's
love had reached that stage at which the physician and (in the case of
certain affections) the boldest of surgeons ask themselves whether
to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still
reasonable, or indeed possible.

Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct knowledge.
When he sought to measure it, it happened sometimes that he found it
diminished, shrunken almost to nothing; for instance, the very moderate
liking, amounting almost to dislike, which, in the days before he was
in love with Odette, he had felt for her expressive features, her faded
complexion, returned on certain days. "Really, I am making distinct
headway," he would tell himself on the morrow, "when I come to think it
over carefully, I find out that I got hardly any pleasure, last night,
out of being in bed with her; it's an odd thing, but I actually thought
her ugly." And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended a long
way beyond the province of physical