o longer employed those words by which she had
sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her, creating
opportunities for saying "my" and "mine" when she referred to him: "You
are all that I have in the world; it is the perfume of our friendship, I
shall keep it," nor spoke to him of the future, of death itself, as of
a single adventure which they would have to share. In those early days,
whatever he might say to her, she would answer admiringly: "You know,
you will never be like other people!"--she would gaze at his long,
slightly bald head, of which people who know only of his successes
used to think: "He's not regularly good-looking, if you like, but he is
smart; that tuft, that eyeglass, that smile!" and, with more curiosity
perhaps to know him as he really was than desire to become his mistress,
she would sigh:

"I do wish I could find out what there is in that head of yours!"

But, now, whatever he might say, she would answer, in a tone sometimes
of irritation, sometimes indulgent: "Ah! so you never will be like other
people!"

She would gaze at his head, which was hardly aged at all by his recent
anxieties (though people now thought of it, by the same mental process
which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music
of which one has read the programme, or the 'likenesses' in a child
whose family one has known: "He's not positively ugly, if you like,
but he is really rather absurd; that eyeglass, that tuft, that smile!"
realising in their imagination, fed by suggestion, the invisible
boundary which divides, at a few months' interval, the head of an ardent
lover from a cuckold's), and would say:

"Oh, I do wish I could change you; put some sense into that head of
yours."

Always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped, if it was only
Odette's way of behaving to him that left room for doubt, he would fling
himself greedily upon her words: "You can if you like," he would tell
her.

And he tried to explain to her that to comfort him, to control him, to
make him work would be a noble task, to which numbers of other women
asked for nothing better than to be allowed to devote themselves, though
it is only fair to add that in those other women's hands the noble
task would have seemed to Swann nothing more than an indiscreet and
intolerable usurpation of his freedom of action. "If she didn't love me,
just a little," he told himself, "she would not wish to have me altered.
To