ow many times?"

"Oh, Charles! can't you see, you're killing me? It's all ever so long
ago. I've never given it a thought. Anyone would say that you were
positively trying to put those ideas into my head again. And then you'd
be a lot better off!" she concluded, with unconscious stupidity but with
intentional malice.

"I only wished to know whether it had been since I knew you. It's only
natural. Did it happen here, ever? You can't give me any particular
evening, so that I can remind myself what I was doing at the time? You
understand, surely, that it's not possible that you don't remember with
whom, Odette, my love."

"But I don't know; really, I don't. I think it was in the Bois, one
evening when you came to meet us on the Island. You had been dining with
the Princesse des Laumes," she added, happy to be able to furnish him
with an exact detail, which testified to her veracity. "At the next
table there was a woman whom I hadn't seen for ever so long. She said to
me, 'Come along round behind the rock, there, and look at the moonlight
on the water!' At first I just yawned, and said, 'No, I'm too tired,
and I'm quite happy where I am, thank you.' She swore there'd never been
anything like it in the way of moonlight. 'I've heard that tale before,'
I said to her; you see, I knew quite well what she was after." Odette
narrated this episode almost as if it were a joke, either because it
appeared to her to be quite natural, or because she thought that she was
thereby minimising its importance, or else so as not to appear ashamed.
But, catching sight of Swann's face, she changed her tone, and:

"You are a fiend!" she flung at him, "you enjoy tormenting me, making me
tell you lies, just so that you'll leave me in peace."

This second blow struck at Swann was even more excruciating than the
first. Never had he supposed it to have been so recent an affair, hidden
from his eyes that had been too innocent to discern it, not in a past
which he had never known, but in evenings which he so well remembered,
which he had lived through with Odette, of which he had supposed himself
to have such an intimate, such an exhaustive knowledge, and which now
assumed, retrospectively, an aspect of cunning and deceit and cruelty.
In the midst of them parted, suddenly, a gaping chasm, that moment on
the Island in the Bois de Boulogne. Without being intelligent, Odette
had the charm of being natural. She had recounted, she had acted the
little s