harpness of this pain that had
awakened him.

Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important
matters which took up so much of her time every day (albeit he had lived
long enough in the world to know that such matters are never anything
else than pleasures) he could not sustain for any length of time the
effort to imagine them; his brain would become a void; then he would
pass a finger over his tired eyelids, in the same way as he might have
wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There
emerged, however, from this unexplored tract, certain occupations which
reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with some
obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as
they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning
as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the
necessary, unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which
she referred, from time to time, to "the day when I go with my friend
to the Hippodrome," if, when he felt unwell and had thought, "Perhaps
Odette would be kind and come to see me," he remembered, suddenly, that
it was one of those very days, he would correct himself with an "Oh,
no! It's not worth while asking her to come; I should have thought of it
before, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the Hippodrome.
We must confine ourselves to what is possible; no use wasting our time
in proposing things that can't be accepted and are declined in
advance." And this duty that was incumbent upon Odette, of going to the
Hippodrome, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not merely
ineluctable in itself; but the mark of necessity which stamped it seemed
to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely
connected with it. If, when Odette, in the street, had acknowledged the
salute of a passer-by, which had aroused Swann's jealousy, she replied
to his questions by associating the stranger with any of the two or
three paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him; if, for
instance, she said: "That's a gentleman who was in my friend's box the
other day; the one I go to the Hippodrome with," that explanation would
set Swann's suspicions at rest; it was, after all, inevitable that
this friend should have other guests than Odette in her box at the
Hippodrome, but he had never sought to form or succeeded in forming any
coherent impression of them. Oh! how he