"Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind, and lacked imagination. He knew perfectly well as a general truth, that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each individual human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed. At such times as he spent with Odette, if their conversation turned upon an indelicate act committed, or an indelicate sentiment expressed by some third person, she would condemn them by virtue of the same moral principles which Swann had always heard expressed by his own parents, and to which he himself had remained faithful; and then she would arrange her flowers, would sip her tea, would inquire about Swann’s work. So Swann extended those attitudes to fill the rest of her life, and reconstructed those actions when he wished to form a picture of the moments in which he and she were apart. If anyone had portrayed her to him as she was, or rather as she had been for so long, with himself, but had substituted some other man, he would have been distressed, for such a portrait would have struck him as lifelike. But to suppose that she went to brothels, that she indulged in orgies with other women, that she led the crapulous existence of the most abject, the most contemptible of mortals—would be an insane aberration, for the realisation of which, thank heaven, the chrysanthemums that he could imagine, the daily cups of tea, the virtuous indignation left neither time nor place."

At such times as he spent with Odette, if their conversation turned upon an indelicate act committed, or an indelicate sentiment expressed by some third person, she would condemn them by virtue of the same moral principles which Swann had always heard expressed by his own parents, and to which he himself had remained faithful; and then she would arrange her flowers, would sip her tea, would inquire about Swann’s work.

Everett prepares to diagram the sentence. He has

requested a large piece of chalk, and a footstool.