, with a transier-ticket, an
atmosphere of fashionable life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with
the harsher fragrance of newly cleaned kid. And Swann felt himself
overflowing with gratitude to her, as well as to Mme. Verdurin (and
almost to Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her was
no longer tinged with pain, was scarcely even to be described, now,
as love), while from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with
loving eyes, as she gallantly threaded her way along the Rue Bonaparte,
her plume erect, her skirt held up in one hand, while in the other she
clasped her umbrella and her card-case, so that its monogram could be
seen, her muff dancing in the air before her as she went.

To compete with and so to stimulate the moribund feelings that Swann had
for Odette, Mme. Cottard, a wiser physician, in this case, than ever
her husband would have been, had grafted among them others more normal,
feelings of gratitude, of friendship, which in Swann's mind were to make
Odette seem again more human (more like other women, since other women
could inspire the same feelings in him), were to hasten her final
transformation back into that Odette, loved with an undisturbed
affection, who had taken him home one evening after a revel at the
painter's, to drink orangeade with Forcheville, that Odette with whom
Swann had calculated that he might live in happiness.

In former times, having often thought with terror that a day must come
when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to
keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to
escape him, to cling tightly to it and to hold it back. But now, to the
faintness of his love there corresponded a simultaneous faintness in
his desire to remain her lover. For a man cannot change, that is to say
become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the
self which he has ceased to be. Occasionally the name, if it caught
his eye in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have been
Odette's lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very slight, and,
inasmuch as it proved to him that he had not completely emerged from
that period in which he had so keenly suffered--though in it he had also
known a way of feeling so intensely happy--and that the accidents of his
course might still enable him to catch an occasional glimpse, stealthily
and at a distance, of its beauties, this jealousy gave him, if anything,