And
indeed, if, during the current month, he were to come less liberally to
the aid of Odette in her financial difficulties than in the month before,
when he had given her five thousand francs, if he refrained from offering
her a diamond necklace for which she longed, he would be allowing her
admiration for his generosity to decline, that gratitude which had made
him so happy, and would even be running the risk of her imagining that his
love for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow fewer) had itself
diminished. And then, suddenly, he asked himself whether that was not
precisely what was implied by 'keeping' a woman (as if, in fact, that idea
of 'keeping' could be derived from elements not at all mysterious nor
perverse, but belonging to the intimate routine of his daily life, such as
that thousand-franc note, a familiar and domestic object, torn in places
and mended with gummed paper, which his valet, after paying the household
accounts and the rent, had locked up hi a drawer in the old writing-desk
whence he had extracted it to send it, with four others, to Odette) and
whether it was not possible to apply to Odette, since he had known her
(for he never imagined for a moment that she could ever have taken a penny
from anyone else, before), that title, which he had believed so wholly
inapplicable to her, of 'kept' woman.
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