And as she spoke she bestowed on him a smile which he
interpreted as meaning that she was entirely his.
And then, while she was making them some orangeade, suddenly, just as when
the reflector of a lamp that is badly fitted begins by casting all round
an object, on the wall beyond it, huge and fantastic shadows which, in
time, contract and are lost in the shadow of the object itself, all the
terrible and disturbing ideas which he had formed of Odette melted away
and vanished in the charming creature who stood there before his eyes. He
had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent in Odette's house, in the
lamp-light, was, perhaps, after all, not an artificial hour, invented for
his special use (with the object of concealing that frightening and
delicious thing which was incessantly in his thoughts without his ever
being able to form a satisfactory impression of it, an hour of Odette's
real life, of her life when he was not there, looking on) with theatrical
properties and pasteboard fruits, but was perhaps a genuine hour of
Odette's life; that, if he himself had not been there, she would have
pulled forward the same armchair for Forcheville, would have poured out
for him, not any unknown brew, but precisely that orangeade which she was
now offering to them both; that the world inhabited by Odette was not that
other world, fearful and supernatural, in which he spent his time in
placing her--and which existed, perhaps, only in his imagination, but the
real universe, exhaling no special atmosphere of gloom, comprising that
table at which he might sit down, presently, and write, and this drink
which he was being permitted, now, to taste; all the objects which he
contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if,
in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they
themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the
palpable realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they
took shape and grew solid before-his eyes, and at the same time they
soothed his troubled heart.
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