He began to reckon up how much that was painful, perhaps
even how much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the
phrase; and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter though the
phrase repeated that love is frail and fleeting, when his love was so
strong! He played with the melancholy which the phrase diffused, he felt
it stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened
his sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play him the phrase
again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she
must never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those
earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How
closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until
lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as
to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to stop,
saying: "How do you expect me to play when you keep on holding me? I can't
do everything at once. Make up your mind what you want; am I to play the
phrase or do you want to play with me?" Then he would become annoyed, and
she would burst out with a laugh which, was transformed, as it left her
lips, and descended upon him in a shower of kisses.
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