.. since the table-turning!"
From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once
had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be
realised now. And the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had once more
shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him any
attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading signs of a slight
movement on her part towards him with the same tender and sceptical
solicitude, the desperate joy that people reveal who, when they are
nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable malady, relate, as
significant facts of infinite value: "Yesterday he went through his
accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we had made in
adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to enjoy it, if he
digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet to-morrow,"--although
they themselves know that these things are meaningless on the eve of an
inevitable death. No doubt Swann was assured that if he had now been
living at a distance from Odette he would gradually have lost all interest
in her, so that he would have been glad to learn that she was leaving
Paris for ever; he would have had the courage to remain there; but he had
not the courage to go.
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