Furthermore, this idea of seeing her again came back to him adorned with a
novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence, all of which long habit
had enfeebled, but which had acquired new vigour during this privation,
not of three days but of a fortnight (for a period of abstinence may be
calculated, by anticipation, as having lasted already until the final date
assigned to it), and had converted what had been, until then, a pleasure
in store, which could easily be sacrificed, into an unlooked-for happiness
which he was powerless to resist. Finally, the idea returned to him with
its beauty enhanced by his own ignorance of what Odette might have
thought, might, perhaps, have done on finding that he shewed no sign of
life, with the result that he was going now to meet with the entrancing
revelation of an Odette almost unknown.
But she, just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was
only a feint, saw nothing but a pretext in the question which he came,
now, to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage, or the purchase of
stock. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these crises
through which he passed, and in the general idea which she formed of them
she made no attempt to understand their mechanism, looking only to what
she knew beforehand, their necessary, never-failing and always identical
termination.
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