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Updated: May 18, 2025
When he came away from Odette, he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled the smile with which, in gentle mockery, she had spoken to him of this man or of that, a smile which was all tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as though against her will, upon his lips, as she had done on that first evening in the carriage; her languishing gaze at him while she lay nestling in his arms, her bended head seeming to recede between her shoulders, as though shrinking from the cold.
One day when Swann had gone out early in the afternoon to pay a call, and had failed to find the person at home whom he wished to see, it occurred to him to go, instead, to Odette, at an hour when, although he never went to her house then as a rule, he knew that she was always at home, resting or writing letters until tea-time, and would enjoy seeing her for a moment, if it did not disturb her.
Now and again it came back to him, like a twinge of pain, that Odette Rider was in danger; and he wanted to have done with this business, to bundle Milburgh into a prison cell, and devote the whole of his energies to tracing her. Such a twinge came to him now as he watched the stout figure at the table.
Then the sirens began and the guns followed just as Maurice and Odette got back They seemed unusually loud and we could hear the bits of shrapnel falling on the terrace beneath us, Odette was frightened and suggested going into the cellar but as Maurice's rooms are only on the second floor, we did not want to take the trouble.
It was in this fashion that Swann had often carried back his mind to the image of Odette, encountered in the theatre, on that first evening when he had no thought of ever seeing her again and that he now recalled the party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's, at which he had introduced General de Frober-ville to Mme. de Cambremer.
Again and again he turned the problem over in his mind. At every point he was baffled by the wild improbability of the facts that he had discovered. Why should Odette Rider be content to accept a servile position in Lyne's Stores when her mother was living in luxury at Hertford?
Perhaps, moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view of a country to which he may never return.
"What exchange was that?" he asked, and the operator after a moment supplied the information that it was Hampstead. Odette Rider sat back in a corner of the smooth-running taxicab. Her eyes were closed, for the inevitable reaction had come.
Happily he was interrupted, probably as a result of Milburgh telling him that Miss Odette Rider had been spirited away." He looked back to the drooping figure by the side of the bed. "He's a little bigger than I," he said, "but I think some of my clothes will fit him." He made a hasty search of his wardrobe and came back with an armful of clothes.
I wondered whether Odette Rider loved her mother sufficiently well to make the great sacrifice, to take full responsibility for the irregularities which had occurred in the accounts' department of Lyne's Stores, and clear away to the Continent until the matter blew over. I intended seeing her the next day, but I was still doubtful as to whether she would fall in with my views.
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