The train began to move; he awoke in alarm, and remembered that
he was not going away, that he would see Odette that evening, and next day
and almost every day. And then, being still deeply moved by his dream, he
would thank heaven for those special circumstances which made him
independent, thanks to which he could remain in Odette's vicinity, and
could even succeed in making her allow him to see her sometimes; and,
counting over the list of his advantages: his social position--his
fortune, from which she stood too often in need of assistance not to
shrink from the prospect of a definite rupture (having even, so people
said, an ulterior plan of getting him to marry her)--his friendship with
M. de Charlus, which, it must be confessed, had never won him any very
great favour from Odette, but which gave him the pleasant feeling that she
was always hearing complimentary things said about him by this common
friend for whom she had so great an esteem--and even his own intelligence,
the whole of which he employed in weaving, every day, a fresh plot which
would make his presence, if not agreeable, at any rate necessary to Odette
--he thought of what might have happened to him if all these advantages
had been lacking, he thought that, if he had been, like so many other men,
poor and humble, without resources, forced to undertake any task that
might be offered to him, or tied down by parents or by a wife, he might
have been obliged to part from Odette, that that dream, the terror of
which was still so recent, might well have been true; and he said to
himself: "People don't know when they are happy.
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