What distress he must have caused her! Certainly he found adequate reasons
for his resentment, but they would not have been sufficient to make him
feel that resentment, if he had not so passionately loved her. Had he not
nourished grievances, just as serious, against other women, to whom he
would, none the less, render willing service to-day, feeling no anger
towards them because he no longer loved them? If the day ever came when he
would find himself in the same state of indifference with regard to
Odette, he would then understand that it was his jealousy alone which had
led him to find something atrocious, unpardonable, in this desire (after
all, so natural a desire, springing from a childlike ingenuousness and
also from a certain delicacy in her nature) to be able, in her turn, when
an occasion offered, to repay the Verdurins for their hospitality, and to
play the hostess in a house of her own.
He returned to the other point of view--opposite to that of his love and
of his jealousy, to which he resorted at times by a sort of mental equity,
and in order to make allowance for different eventualities--from which he
tried to form a fresh judgment of Odette, based on the supposition that he
had never been in love with her, that she was to him just a woman like
other women, that her life had not been (whenever he himself was not
present) different, a texture woven in secret apart from him, and warped
against him.
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