Vinteuil, about this time,
avoiding people whom he knew, and turning away as soon as he caught sight
of them, changed in a few months into an old man, engulfed in a sea of
sorrows, incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting his
daughter's happiness, spending whole days beside his wife's grave, could
hardly have failed to realise that he was gradually dying of a broken
heart, could hardly have supposed that he paid no attention to the rumours
which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed, what his
neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid his
virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of
circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he
himself has been most outspoken in condemning, without at first
recognising it beneath the disguise which it assumes on entering his
presence, so as to wound him and to make him suffer; the odd words, the
unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand
reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must
have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to
resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to
occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs
to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a vice
which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no
more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might
blend the colours of their eyes.
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