He counted the minutes
feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to be quite certain that he
had not given himself short measure, and so, possibly, exaggerated
whatever chance there might actually be of his arriving at Prevost's in
time, and of finding her still there. And then, in a moment of
illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep and is conscious
of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his mind has been
wandering without any clear distinction between himself and them, Swann
suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the thoughts which he
had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard at the Verdurins'
that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from which he was suffering,
but of which he was only now conscious, as though he had just woken up.
What! all this disturbance simply because he would not see Odette, now,
till to-morrow, exactly what he had been hoping, not an hour before, as he
drove toward Mme. Verdurin's. He was obliged to admit also that now, as he
sat in the same carriage and drove to Prevost's, he was no longer the same
man, was no longer alone even--but that a new personality was there beside
him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a creature from whom he might,
perhaps, be unable to liberate himself, towards whom he might have to
adopt some such stratagem as one uses to outwit a master or a malady.
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